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THE CITIES OF UMBRIA 



BY THE SAME AUTHOR. ' 

FREDERIC UVEDALE. A Romance. 
STUDIES IN THE LIVES OF THE SAINTS 
ITALY AND THE ITALIANS 




PORTA AUGUSTA, PERUGIA 



THE CITIES OF UMBRIA 



BY 



EDWARD HUTTON 



WITH 20 ILLUSTRATIONS IN COLOUR BY A. PISA 
AND 12 OTHER ILLUSTRATIONS 



NEW YORK 
E. P. BUTTON AND COMPANY 

1905 






^HA"^i:} Cf 



ok 









TO ALICE 

In hoc saltern libro inveniam faciem tioam. 



May SI, 1904 



CONTENTS 



PREFACE, . 

IMPRESSIONS OF THE CITIES OF UMBRIA 

I. PERUGIA, . 
II. ASSIST, .... 

III. SPELLO, . . . . 

IV. FdLIGNO AND MONTEFALCO, 
V. TREVI AND THE TEMPLE OF CLITUMNUS, 

VI. SPOLETO, . . 

VII. ON THE WAY TO NARNI, 
VIII. TODI, . . 

IX. ORVIETO, . 
X. CITTA DELLA PIEVE, 

XI. GUBBIO, FABRIANO, CAGLI, AND THE FURLO PASS, 
XII. URBINO, . . 



PAGE 

xi 





3 




23 




45 




50 




60 




64 




72 




76 




84 




99 


ss. 


102 




115 



THE UMBRIAN SCHOOL OF PAINTING 

XIII. UMBRIAN ART, . . . . - . . 133 

XIV. PIERO DELLA FRANCESCA, .. . . . 153 
XV. MELOZZO DA FORLI, . . . . . 164 



Vlll 



THE CITIES OF UMBRIA 



XVI. LUCA SIGNORELLI AT ORVIETO, 
XVII. BENEDETTO BONFIGLI, 
XVIII. FIORENZO DI LORENZO, 
XIX. PERUGINO, . 
XX. PINTORICOHIO, 



PAGE 

168 
181 
189 
201 
218 



UMBRIA MYSTICA 

XXI. JOACHIM DI FLORE, 
XXII. ST. FRANCIS OF ASSISI, 

XXIII. ST. CLARE, . . 

XXIV. BROTHER BERNARD, 
XXV. BROTHER ELIAS, 

CONCLUSION, 



227 
243 
272 
281 

287 
298 



LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS 



IN COLOUR 

PORTA AUGUSTA, PERUGIA, 
PIAZZA S. LORENZO, PERUGIA, . 
PIAZZA DEL MERCATO, PERUGIA, 
VICOLO S. AGNESE, PERUGIA, . 
CAPPELLA DEI PELLEGRINI, ASSISI, . 
ASSIST, . . . . . . 

NAVE OF THE LOWER CHURCH OF S. FRANCESCO, ASSISI 

S. FRANCESCO, ASSISI, 

CLOISTERS, S. FRANCESCO, ASSISI, 

PORTA VENERIS, SPELLO, . 

PORTA VENERIS, SPELLO, . 

NEAR THE TEMPLE OF CLITUMNUS, 

DUOMO, TODI, . . . . 

PALAZZO PUBBLICO, TODI, . 
DUOMO, ORVIETO, 
S. GIOVANNI BATTISTA, GUBBIO, 
VIA DELLE OCCHI, GUBBIO, 
PALAZZO PUBBLICO, GUBBIO, 



Frontispiece 
to face page 4 >^ 
12^ 



21' 



^ 



23 

31 
33" 
39 ^ 
42 / 
45 i/ 
47 ^ 
61*^ 
76/ 
8l/ 
89 • 
102' 
106 , 
111 / 



X THE CITIES OF UMBRIA 

PULPIT, LOWER OHURCH OF S. FRANCESCO, ASSISI, . to JaCQ page 269 
CHAPEL IN S. FRANCESCO, ASSISI, .... ,, 295 



FROM PHOTOGRAPHS BY MESSES. ALINARI 



THE SACRIFICE OF ISAAC — ROMAN SCHOOL, 

MADONNA AND CHILD — OTTAVIANO NELLI, 

ADORATION OF THE MAGI — GENTILE DA FABRIANO, 

THE RESURRECTION— PIERO DELLA FRANCESCA, 

THE ANTICHRIST — LUCA SIGNORELLI, 

THE ADORATION OF THE MAGI — BENEDETTO BONFIGLI, 

GONFALONE DI S. BERNARDINO — BENEDETTO BONFIGLI, 

MADONNA AND CHILD WITH SAINTS — FIORENZO DI 
LORENZO, 

ADORATION OP THE SHEPHERDS— FIORENZO DI 
LORENZO, 

THE PRESEPIO — PIETRO PERUGINO, . . . 

ADORATION OF THE MAGI — PIETRO PERUGINO, . 

THE MADONNA — BERNARDINO PINTORICCHIO, . 



to face page 140 
144 
146 
153 
176 
183 
186 

189 



y 



/ 



*'' 



194 
201 ' 

212 ■■- 
218 



PREFACE 

/^NE day of sunshine, mysterious and full of silence, as 
^^ I was wandering among the hills about Fiesole, where 
hundreds of years ago Lorenzo of the Medici held his 
court, and, as I have been told, Botticelli first saw La Bella 
Simonetta in the spring, out of the splendour and sweet 
spaciousness of that gentle world, or perhaps from the 
cypresses that crown the soft round hills with mystery, there 
came to me an old chant, older, perhaps, than Christianity, 
that I had heard years and years ago when I was a child 
at Perugia, that city under the Apennines where they still 
guard the wedding-ring of the Blessed Virgin. It was an 
old tune that seemed to bear in its few notes all the romance 
of that world so long ago with its lovely gods ; something 
of the simple and correct beauty of all that ; and yet to 
suggest an underlying sadness and regret of the beauty 
that had passed away. A sudden longing seized me as I 
lay under the olives to hear the Mass sung in that bleak 
old church, to look once more on the Umbrian Hills, and to 
see the light that never was in any Tuscan vale flooding 
the valley of Spoleto, and the countless indestructible cities. 
And as I lay there watching a peasant, whose clear-cut 
features proclaimed his race, sow his seed broadcast, as of 



xii THE CITIES OF UMBRIA 

old, over the plough-land, while behind him and above him 
the vines flung themselves from myrtle to myrtle under 
the profound and soft sky, I determined to set out that 
night for Umbria, the true Italia Mystica, whose saints 
have captured the world, whose valleys have beckoned many 
armies towards Rome. Once more I would see Assisi, that 
Italian Nazareth, early in the morning, and follow the road 
towards Foligno, the city of the Blessed Angela, most human, 
perhaps, of all saints, and say farewell to St. Mary of the 
Angels. Above me all day, like a Religious prostrate in 
his brown habit, on his knees, bending towards Rome, Monte 
Subasio would tower, whose snows are in springtime the 
one hard field of light in all the valley of Spoleto ; for it 
is a valley of infinite softness and space, and the gesture 
of the mountains is of a profound nobility. At eventide 
I would come to Foligno, where in S. Felicita Blessed 
Angela besought of St. Francis a little happiness after great 
sorrow till she heard Christ whisper, one breathless morning, 
'I love thee more than any woman in the valley of Spoleto.' 
And I, too, would beseech of St. Francis a little happiness, 
in St. Mary's of the Angels ; and what might I not find — 
yes, even one so in love with life as I — in a land that held 
such gifts 1 So I set out not without hope. 

It was night when I came to Perugia. The hostelry was 
comfortable, the host kind and thoughtful, the sunset as 
ever had been a passion of sudden glory. In that vast 
country, for so it seems, far from any real city, it is those 
primitive and absolute movements in the sky — the sunset, 



PREFACE xiii 

the sunrise, and high noon, the gathering of the clouds 
over the hills, the terrible onslaught and march of the storm, 
the mystery and silence of cloudless sunshine — that move us, 
that are of importance to us, as they never can be in a city, 
where they are obscured by the foulness of life, the unnatural- 
ness of existence amid millions of petty details, insignificant 
and mortal. But here in Umbria, where Perugino was, in 
fact, merely a realist who, so far as landscape is concerned 
at any rate, painted just what he saw, the sweet movements 
of heaven are of a due importance, and thrust themselves 
not roughly, but very surely and quietly nevertheless, upon 
our notice, assuring us almost with music of the existence 
of God and His angels, and the beauty and simplicity of 
life. 

Tired by my journey, for Florence is far from Perugia, 
I fell asleep into the night that had a blessedness scarcely 
to be found in the North — seeing that the floor of heaven 
here seemed softer than a blue mantle on which lay a 
scattered multitude of lilies — to dream of to-morrow, that 
delight of the traveller, its gifts, its dust and heat, its shade 
and pleasant shallow streams, its weariness and satisfaction. 

Just at dawn I was awakened, and went out into that 
virginal hour, having eaten a mouthful of golden-coloured 
bread, very pleasant to the taste, and a little honey, which 
I bought in the market-place. Behind me and before me 
lay the beautiful valley clad in a mist that was rose-colour 
and gold, and softer than the bloom upon the grapes. Many 
cities seeming white and very pure lifted their towers into the 



xiv THE CITIES OF UMBRIA 

sky. Perugia herself was in the attitude of prayer ; Assisi, 
a little grey, lay still asleep upon the skirts of Subasio; 
little Spello seemed to stretch her arms towards the sky ; 
while Trevi on her hill kept sentinel, armed at all points, 
her housetops battlements, her wind-vanes bright swords. 
Only Spoleto under her monastery, holding the very precious 
dust of Filippo Lippi in her heart, seemed to be watching the 
dawn which presently swept over her hills, covering them 
with a matchless glory. And it seemed to me in that hour 
that if the noblest day's journey in the world had to be 
chosen, it is by this way we should pass, down this valley we 
should come, perhaps from Florence to Arezzo, past Cortona, 
the city of Signorelli, that still holds, though hidden, the 
dust of that great unfortunate man who built the tomb of 
St. Francis and hid his body for six hundred years ; past Lake 
Thrasymene where St. Francis kept his fast, and Perugia 
where Perugino learned the nobility of perfect space, and 
Assisi and Foligno and Spoleto, whose mighty fortress har- 
boured Lucrezia Borgia, and Terni with her waterfalls, and 
so over the mountains to Narni, till from afar suddenly the 
classical form of Monte Soracte rises out of the Campagna, 
and at last after passing the vineyards of Monte Rotondo, at 
a little village called Castel Giubileo, far, oh ! far away, we 
might see the dome of S. Pietro rise like the immense hope 
of the world, inexpressible and as yet unbroken, into heaven, 
blue and white like the sky itself. The supreme nobility of 
this Latin landscape, the cradle of our civilisation, moves us 
as no other sight perhaps in the world can do. This is the 



PREFACE XV 

land of our second birth, and still beyond the remotest of 
horizons she holds for us most of that which is very precious. 

Those cypresses beside the Tiber, that villa over the valley, 
the sound of the bells that came to us lying under the olives — 
do you remember, little Princess, do you remember 1 or have 
you forgotten everything now that I am so far away ? 

Ah, no ! you cannot forget that day when we, two pilgrims 
from a less lovely world, came to Assisi; and, seeing our 
simplicity, the Brother told us all his stories. That day at 
least you will not forget, for did it not seem to us that we 
had met St. Francis himself in the rose-garden beside St. 
Mary of the Angels, and when we had thanked him did he 
not hang his medals round our necks for remembrance — one 
for you and one for me ; and since we secretly wished it, I 
think he blessed usi How tired you were when, for our 
delight, we had tried to see Giotto's work in that dark lower 
church glowing with precious frescoes; how delightful and 
cool you found the quiet Campo Santo ; how happy we were 
over our bread and wine ! Do you think I can forget your 
laughter, or the shadow of the swaying cypress that every 
now and then passed over your hair as a cloud passes over 
the sun, or the folds of your dress, or the gesture of your 
hands ? Those old dead saints into whose dreams we came 
for a little moment, how long and long will it be before they 
hear your laughter again ? And I, who was so happy with 
you in the byways and olive-gardens. of Umbria, how shall I 
visit them again now you are far away 1 No ; I shall not dare 



xvi THE CITIES OF UMBRIA 

to visit them again without you. I shall wait, and since you 
are now so busy making others happy, I have reminded 
myself of all those things you have perhaps forgotten, 
that I may bring them to your remembrance and place them 
under the benediction of your hands. 

Indeed, if we had world enough and time, for a little 
moment we might be content with remembrance. But Italy 
is changing — already how many thousands have looked with 
indifference on that which we found so precious ; how many 
thousands, think you, Princess, have laughed at the stories we 
took for true ? It is an army that passes. 

But amid all the mediocrity of life from which it is so 
difficult to escape, am I not compelled to pardon and to cease 
to ask : Life, why have you disappointed me 1 — since you 
have blown in the sweetest blossoms and passed me lightly, 
lightly in my dreams 1 

Do you remember, little Princess, do you remember ? 

May 21, 1904 



IMPRESSIONS OF THE CITIES OF UMBRIA 



PERUGIA 

AS you come to Perugia from Florence and Terontola, 
past the mystical lake of Trasimeno, where, on an 
island surrounded by whispering rushes that seem ever to 
be commanding silence, St. Francis spent the Lent of which 
the author of the Fim'etti tells us, you might think the 
city that reveals herself so fantastically, first on the right 
hand and then on the left between the low Umbrian Hills, 
only a great fortress, the castle of some belated tyrant. On 
a nearer view there is something of a great dignity in her 
isolation on her hill-top, which is, after all, not the last low 
spur of the indestructible Apennine but the deposits, age 
after age, of the Tiber flowing towards Eome and the sea. 
And even as long and long ago the Tiber left her, so that 
now even after the fiercest storms or the deepest snows she 
hears nothing of his terrible song, so at last the world too 
has fallen away from her, leaving her alone on her beautiful 
hill, surrounded only by elemental things — the sun, the 
moon, the stars, and the unchanging mountains. More 
than a mile away the railway slinks towards Rome and the 
south, fearful of her aspect, since it may never approach her, 
and has only dared to come so far by devious ways, and with 
many hesitations. She is so proud on her mountain, over- 
topping the soft green hills of her Umbria, for within her 
immense horizon no other city, ruddy or white, is like to her. 
Her brows are still pale in the morning, and golden with the 



4 THE CITIES OF UMBRIA 

setting sun ; the sky is still above her serene and beautiful ; 
her eyes, which are perhaps tired with waiting for the 
sunrise, may still rest themselves on her own green fields 
and many gardens of olives. It is only at evening some- 
times that you may surprise a kind of fear in her eyes, 
when suddenly above the Vesper bells at sunset she hears 
the electric tram, that has so lately been thrust upon her, 
rush without ceremony or weariness up her hillside, and 
with clanging iron and all the noise of modernity hurry 
through her ancient Corso, past the Palazzo Municipio, 
which in its beautiful old age it threatens to destroy, 
and has already brutally shaken ; past the Duomo, which it 
ignores, into the Piazza Danti, whence it has already expelled 
the beautiful bronze statue of Pope Julius ill. - But after all, 
this modern contrivance, with its network of wires, its noise, 
and its convenience, is the one modern thing that has 
invaded her. The great beautiful oxen still stand patiently 
in her market-place, or draw the plough over her fields ; her 
sons still sow broadcast, over the land they tread with their 
bare feet, the corn and the maize ; the priest still blesses her 
fields; the tiny cross of bamboo with a branch of olive, 
silver in the wind, still marks her fields as the gifts of God 
to her who still remembers Him. In her cathedral the 
wedding-ring of the Blessed Virgin, mystic, wonderful, is 
safe in its many caskets. Her beautiful miracle-picture of 
Madonnina draws its crowd of pilgrims, and she herself, the 
queen of hill cities, is still beautiful within and without her 
Etruscan walls, on which Rome and the Middle Age and the 
Renaissance have not forgotten to leave their marks as 
beautiful and as indestructible. Her streets are even yet 
named nobly — Via della Cupa, Via della Conca, Via dei 
Priori, Via di San Francesco, Via delle Stalle. She has not 
stooped to flatter the new Royal House, as Rome and 
Florence and Naples have done. Her gates, many and 



PEEUGIA 5 

splendid, have too in their very names a suggestion of her 
inviolable beauty — Porta Eburnea, Porta Augusta, Porta Sant' 
Angelo, Porta Sole, Porta Marzia. Within her palaces is some 
of the sweetest work of Perugino, and Bonfigli, and Fiorenzo di 
Lorenzo ; and her prospect is of a thousand hills and valleys. 
Far, oh, far away to the north and west, lie the bare mountains 
above Siena ; while to the south the hills are crowned with 
famous and lovely cities — Assisi, Spello, Trevi, Spoleto ; and, 
like a rosy flower in the green valley of Spoleto, you see 
Foligno, the strange city of Blessed Angela ; while beyond, 
Monte Subasio looks towards Eome with the city of St. 
Francis kneeling on its skirts^ a religious, in the homely brown 
habit, vowed to God. Like a lily at her right hand towers 
St. Mary of the Angels, delicate with the colour of the day — 
white, or almost rosy, or sombre, under her sky. And far 
away to the west rise the mountains above Orvieto and 
little Todi on her hill, and, all between, the sweet Umbrian 
plain and the valley of the Tiber. And though in early 
morning this exquisite landscape is delicate and fragile and 
half-hidden in mist; at sunset it has something of the 'large- 
ness of the evening earth,' and a majesty of silence and 
repose, that is as it were suggested by the beautiful gesture 
of the mountains. It is above all this perfection, absolute 
queen from horizon to horizon, that Perugia stands, ever at 
attention on her hills, terrible of aspect with all her beauty, 
and with great angry eyes as of old searching out her 
enemies. 

Of Etruscan origin, being indeed one of the principal 
cities of that strange, unknown people, we know nothing of 
Perugia till she submitted herself to Eome in B.C. 309. 
That is but the first of numberless surrenders — to the Popes, 
to many tj^rants, to her own terrible sons, to the brutality of 
the mob, to Italy, and the modern world. The hand of the 



6 THE CITIES OF UMBRIA 

Emperor Augustus has rested on her throat as certainly as 
that of the latest tyrant, Baglioni or Pope. It was Augustus 
who in B.C. 38 rebuilt the city, which one of the citizens, 
Caius Macedonicus, in order to save her from the great 
emperor, burnt to the ground, so that she is now Augusta 
Perugia, and Perusia Etrusca no longer. Yet, in spite of 
capitulation and outward obedience, she has ever nursed in 
her soul a fierce spirit of libert}?", which has made her story 
one of the bloodiest in the history of Italy. 

It was in the sixth century that Justinian, desiring to 
drive the Goths out of Italy, sent the general Constantine to 
Umbria, a vastly larger country then than now. Constantine 
seems to have made Perugia his headquarters, and to have 
been left unmolested till, in the year 545, Totila, that 
terrible and magnificent figure, appeared, and having obtained 
possession of Assisi, prepared to drive Constantine from 
Perugia ; but he found her, as ever, not easy of conquest ; to 
be overcome rather by treachery than by fighting. The 
siege which followed is said to have lasted for seven years, 
but at last Perugia fell before the fury of the Goth, ' upheld 
to the last by a new power, namely, that of her faith.' It 
was the first of her patron saints, S. Ercolano, who upheld 
her, and, as it were, in those early years of terror and fight, 
formed her character there in the midst of mystical Italy, 
making her for ever after not unmindful of those mysterious 
powers which in all ages men have been anxious to win to 
their cause, since it would seem to be fatal to permit them 
to be unfriendly. So to the starving city S. Ercolano, its 
bishop, comes with wise counsels ; and as in ancient Rome, so 
in Perugia, in spite of the scarcity, food is thrown from the 
walls, and the Goths discouraged. Bonfigli has painted the 
story with all his simplicity and sweetness in the Cappella dei 
Priori, now Sala Numero Due of the Pinacoteca. It would 
seem that an ox having been fed with what corn remained to 



PERUGIA 7 

the city was thrown over the walls, when the Goths, finding 
it, supposed the Perugians to have so much to eat that they fed 
even their beasts with corn. ' But by chance,' says Ciatti, 
whose history of the city is full of a^n old-world sweetness, 
'But by chance a young priest spoke from the walls with 
some Goths, and all unknowing revealed the terror and 
death reigning in the city.' And so the stratagem of the 
good bishop failed ; yet on that day Perugia fell not without 
honour, and in all her future has never forgotten S. 
Ercolano, who was martyred in her cause, seeing she chose 
him for her patron saint. 

In 592 Perugia, on her high hill, became a Lombard 
duchy, but was soon restored to the Byzantine Empire. 
Through all that mysterious Middle Age she grew stronger 
and more fierce. Her invaders were many, she suffered 
many violations. In the year 726 we find her, together with 
many another Italian city, siding with the Pope against the 
Emperor Leo iii., the Iconoclast, when he published his 
edict against images in churches. It was about this time 
that Rome became practically independent under the Popes, 
and it will be in the memory of the reader that the con- 
troversy with Leo led to the separation of the Greek and 
Latin Churches in 729 ; to be united again at the Council of 
Lyons in 1274, only to be separated finally in 1277. 
Certainly, during those years of fierce and brutal energy, 
Perugia owed much to the Papacy. Thus, in 744, when 
King Rachis of the Lombards besieged Perugia, Pope 
Zacharias came to plead with him not unsuccessfully, and it 
is certainly true to the spirit of that romantic age that the 
king became a monk after listening to the Pope, retiring to 
the Benedictine monastery of Monte Cassino. 

A time of some confusion follows. As ever in Italy, the 
aim of the statesmen was the balance of power, at that time 
between the Emperor and the Pope, as later between the 



8 THE CITIES OF UMBRIA 

great cities and provinces. By this means a certain com- 
munal liberty was attained. 

In the year 800, however, Charlemagne having invaded 
Italy in 774, overcome the Lombards, and been crowned as 
Emperor of the West by Pope Leo iii., Perugia came under 
the dominion of the Pope as a gift from the Emperor. From 
this time Perugia remained under the Papacy save for a 
short period in 1375, when, the Pope being in Avignon, a 
Republic was declared. The history of the city during those 
years is one of continual warfare with her neighbours — Assisi, 
Siena, Arezzo, Citta di Castello, G-ubbio, Foligno, Spoleto. 
In 1358 Perugia won her greatest victory over Siena. 
Having succeeded in defeating almost all her rivals she 
laid upon them heavy burdens : thus Foligno was for- 
bidden to rebuild her walls, Citta della Pieve was compelled 
to provide bricks to pave her streets, Arezzo to yield her 
marble to decorate the cathedral of San Lorenzo. Yet in 
spite of her fierceness, her strength, and her pride, she was 
ever unable to master herself, falling always a prey to her 
own passions, consuming her energy not in wars with her 
rivals alone, but also in massacre and havoc among her own 
citizens. Thus she wasted herself, turning her fierceness 
against herself at last till her streets ran with blood, her 
cathedral was defiled, her greatest sons assassinated, and 
she herself a mere beautiful bastion on a bleak hillside. 

To describe the quarrels of the Baglioni and Oddi would 
serve no useful purpose. Their names are known for every 
kind of brutality and murder to every traveller in Italy from 
the sketch of Perugia which the late J. A. Symonds published 
in his Sketches in Italy, Matarazzo too, to whom of course 
Mr. Symonds was indebted, in a masterpiece of simple 
narrative — if indeed that naive chronicle be the work of the 
distinguished humanist — is full of the dramatic story of their 
hatred, their glory, and their despair. I am content to 



PERUGIA 9 

refer the reader to those pages. It is, however, worthy of- 
notice that it was during the years of internal revolution, 
when every sort of crime was rampant, when murder and 
destruction went barefaced up and down the streets, that 
Perugino and Fiorenzo di Lorenzo were painting their quiet 
and lovely pictures of the birth and death of Christ, while 
the young Raphael was at work in the studio of his master 
Perugino. It has been said that in the St. George of the 
Louvre, and perhaps in the horseman trampling upon 
Heliodorus in the sta^ize of the Vatican, we have a picture 
of Astorre Baglioni, that terrible and yet beautiful figure, 
now immortal since Raphael's eyes once rested upon him. 
It was to one of these figures — terrible, and yet not without 
a certain beauty too — that Perugia owed the opportunity of 
a new, and not altogether unnecessary, despotism. In 1535, 
Ridolfo Baglioni having murdered the Pope's Legate, 
Paul III. determined to send troops to drive Ridolfo out of 
Perugia. In this he was successful, and became himself 
ruler of the city. But in 1538 the Perugians revolted, the 
Pope having raised the price of salt. Paul iii. promptly 
defeated them, and two years later laid the foundation, upon 
a ruined palace of the Baglioni, of the Rocca Paolina, which 
bore the legend 'ad coercendam Perusinorum audaciam.' 
Thus began a rule in Perugia strong and steadfast and 
despotic, which, save for the incident of Napoleon, was not 
to pass away till our own time, when, on the 14th September 
1860, the city was taken by the troops of Victor Emmanuel, 
and became an integral part of United Italy. 

So the splendour and the terror of the past interwoven 
with the thunder of innumerable banners has sunk into the 
mediocrity of to-day, when even silence is denied her lest she 
should recollect herself and remember her victories. Beauty 
such as once belonged to Florence or Venice or Rome was 
perhaps never hers. She was a scarped crag of the moun- 



10 THE CITIES OF UMBRIA 

tains, burnt with fire, beaten by the wind, splendid with the 
sun. Even her cathedral was as relentless as a fortress, at 
least in appearance. But the destroying centuries have 
perhaps lent it something of their tolerance, giving the 
clinkered brick the surface and the colour almost of a pre- 
cious stone. It is not beauty but strength and passion that 
you find in its brown walls that have been splashed with 
blood and washed with wine. Inside there is scarcely beauty 
at all, only silence and space and a softer and more sombre 
light than is usual in an Italian church. And yet in its 
homely, country aspect it might attract where a more 
splendid church would leave you cold, but that its painted 
stucco pillars, fantastic and incredible, seem to impress upon 
you the fact that Perugino was right : religion, even in 
mystical Italy, was for the mass of the people a kind of 
sentimental emotion entirely without intellectuality, ready 
at any moment to fall into sensual or frenzied desire, as 
with the Battuti, the Flagellants, who from Perugia and 
Assisi spread over Italy in the fourteenth century. And it 
is not altogether strange that this people for whom Perugino 
painted — often, we may think, with such contempt — held as 
their most precious possession the wedding or betrothal ring 
of the Blessed Virgin. It is kept under many locks in many 
caskets in the little chapel to the left of the west door of 
the Duomo, and may be seen five times during the year : to 
wit, on March the 19th, which is the Festa dello Sposalizio, 
on March the 25th, which is Our Lady's Day, on the second 
Sunday in July, on July the 30th, and on August the 2nd. 
Made from some agate stone, it is popularly believed to 
change colour according to the hearts of those who look on 
it. It was brought to Perugia in 1472 by Fra Vinterio di 
Magonza, who had * piously ' stolen it from the Franciscans at 
Chiusi. In this chapel too till 1797, when Napoleon took it 
to France, whence it has never returned, hung the Sposalizio, 



PERUGIA 11 

once supposed to be by Perugino, but by later criticism 
given to Lo Spagna.^ A copy now fills the place of the 
original picture. 

On the other side of the chiirch is the Chapel of 
S. Bernardino, which belonged to the merchants' guild. A 
Deposition by Baroccio is over the altar ; the window, per- 
haps the best in the church, is of the sixteenth century. 

A very delightful picture, attributed to Manni, of Madonna, 
hangs over the little altar against the third pillar on the 
right. It is the famous Madonna delle Grazie, the most 
splendid miracle-picture in Umbria. With hands raised 
she seems to deprecate our prayers and to bless us. In- 
numerable trifles, silver hearts, and invisible thankfulness 
surround the altar of a ' miracle ' picture in which even the 
unbending Protestant cannot but find at least a miracle of 
beauty. It is to this altar that the mother always 
brings her child, to lay him for a moment at the feet of 
Madonna after his christening in the Baptistery close by. 
Apart from these wonders there is but little to be seen 
in the. cathedral. A fine altarpiece, however, in the 
winter choir, by Luca Signorelli, is one of the noblest 
pictures in Perugia : Madonna sits with her Child between 
St. John Baptist, S. Onofrio, St. Lawrence, and S. Ercolano, 
while beneath are two beautiful angels, one of whom tunes 
his lute. 

Outside the cathedral are the Piazza Municipio and the 
Piazza Danti. In the latter, the bronze statue of Pope 
Julius III., by Yincenzo Danti, used to stand, but it has now 
been moved to the steps of the cathedral facing the Piazza 
Municipio, where it is entirely out of place, in order to make 
room for the new electric tramway which ought never to 
have been brought up the Corso at all. This vile modern 

^ See The Study and Criticism of Italian Arty vol. ii., by Bernhard 
Berenson. 



12 THE CITIES OF UMBRIA 

contrivance has almost spoiled Perugia, and has turned it 
from a City of Silence to a Pandemonium. It has also done, 
and is still doing, grave injury to the Palazzo Pubblico. 

Close to the statue of Pope Julius, where it now stands 
against the cathedral wall, is the little pulpit from which 
S. Bernardino of Siena used to preach so passionately. It 
was while preaching here that it is said he heard his 
favourite bell, called Viola, which hung in the Campanile of 
the Convent of S. Francesco al Prato, now a ruin, fall to 
the ground, and, stopping his sermon, said to the people, 
*My children, Viola is fallen, but she is not hurt.' But 
S. Bernardino with all his eloquence preached in vain. The 
people wept to hear him, burnt their books and pictures 
and finery on the stones beside the beautiful fountain, and 
then in a few days cheerfully cut each other's throats in 
the very place where they had listened to the good saint, 
and even in the Duomo itself. And was it not here, too, 
that the dead body of the beautiful Astorre Baglioni lay in 
state during two days, together with that of his murderer 
and cousin, Grifonetto 1 

The beautiful fountain which stands in the midst of the 
square was built in 1277 from designs by a Perugian artist, 
Fra Bevignate, a Silvestrian. The lovely statuettes and 
bas-reliefs which adorn it were designed by Niccol6 Pisano, 
and sculptured by his son Giovanni. 

The splendid and picturesque palace, the Palazzo Pubblico, 
which closes the Piazza opposite the cathedral, is one of the 
finest Gothic buildings in all Italy, and is the glory of 
Perugia. Built at the end of the twelfth century by 
Giacomo di Servadio and Giovanni di Benvenuto of Perugia, 
it was finished in the fifteenth century. The great entrance 
in the Corso is still guarded by S. Ercolano, S. Costanzo, 
and St. Louis of Toulouse, the three patron saints of Perugia. 
St. Louis of Toulouse was the great-grandson of St. Louis 



PERUGIA 13 

of France. He was therefore the brother of Robert, King 
of Naples, who beat the Ghibellines at Genoa. It was on 
this occasion that the Perugians chose St. Louis for one of 
their patrons. Thus we find also over the great door of 
their Palazzo Pubblico the two lions of the Guelfs, together 
with the griffins of Perugia. On the side of the Palazzo, 
towards the Duomo, are the lean lion of the Guelf cause 
again, in bronze, and the griffin of Perugia, while beneath 
is the Scala della Vaccara, a very beautiful flight of steps 
lately restored to its original design. 

You enter the Palazzo Pubblico by the great entrance in 
the Corso ; here all the business of Perugia would seem to 
be conducted. Groups of men stand talking, talking, and 
even their uncouth dialect cannot spoil the majesty of the 
Latin tongue. It is a picturesque sight, these bronzed 
contadini in their sheepskins and their great furred coats 
doing their business in the beautiful old portico of their 
Municipio. Though all things pass away, in Italy at least 
there is always left the shadow of former greatness — some 
suggestion on a fortunate day of all the tragedy of the 
centuries, in a great ruined gateway or the cold broken 
limbs of a forgotten god. 

The churches of Perugia are many, and for the most part 
of little interest. S. Pietro dei Cassinesi, whose beautiful 
tower can be seen from the Piazza della Prefettura, is 
really the only church in the city which has not been emptied 
of its treasures. S. Pietro, it is said, enjoys this privilege 
because the monks befriended the army of Vittorio Eman- 
uele in 1860, when that king took the city. As the traveller 
walks to S. Pietro down the Via Marzia and the Via Flora- 
monti he will pass down the steps of S. Ercolano, and come 
upon that tiny octagonal Gothic church, built against the 
Etruscan walls in 1200 in the place where Totila is said to 
have martyred S. Ercolano himself. Beyond the beauty of 



14 THE CITIES OF UMBRIA 

its architecture there is nothing of interest in the church. 
Passing down the Via Cavour, you come on the left to the 
gaunt unfinished church of S. Domenico. The strange 
broken tower is beautiful from the Piazza della Prefettura, 
especially at night, when its wounds are hidden and it re- 
members perhaps its many prayers. Giovanni Pisano is said 
to have made designs for the church, which was begun early 
in the fourteenth century ; but in the innumerable wars of 
that period the church he built was destroyed, and so in the 
middle of the seventeenth century it was rebuilt from the 
designs of Carlo Maderno. The interior is terrible in its 
dilapidated mediocrity. In the left transept is a fine tomb 
of Pope Benedict xi., 1303, by Giovanni Pisano. The Pope 
lies behind curtains which two angels are drawing close. 
The two spiral columns which support the canopy were inlaid 
with mosaic — stolen, it is said, by the soldiers of Napoleon; 
beautiful figures of children are sculptured on the pillars. 
This lovely Gothic tomb is one of the most interesting things 
in Perugia. The fourth chapel, too, on the south side, has 
an altar with some terra-cotta statues and other decorations 
by Agostino Ducci. The gaunt tower was lowered by 
Paul III. since . it interrupted his view from the Rocca, and 
indeed overlooked the fortress. 

You pass now on the way to S. Pietro under the Porta 
Romana, built by Agostino Ducci in 1476, and come upon the 
first Cathedral of Perugia, the monastic Church of S. Pietro dei 
Cassinesi, the most interesting church left in the city. It was 
built in 963 by S. Pietro Vinci oli, of the Benedictine Order 
of Monte Cassino, but was redecorated in the fifteenth 
century. The beautiful courtyard and monastery, now 
secularised and turned into an agricultural school, have 
perhaps spoiled the original fa9ade of the church, but in the 
quietness and loneliness which seem to have fallen upon it, 
it retains much of the spirit of its founder, the Benedictine 



PERUGIA 15 

monk of that lonely monastery in Southern Italy. Only 
three monks remain to guard the church, and as you pass 
with one of them between the many columns of marble and 
stone, taken so long ago from the Jbemple of Venus which 
stood where now a temple of Christ stands — how soon to be 
quite spoiled like that of the goddess ! — it is as though Time 
himself had with a certain irony allowed you to look for a 
moment on his mysterious vengeance, his destructive justice. 
Humanism, the belief that ' nothing which has ever interested 
living men and women can wholly lose its vitality — no 
language they have spoken, nor oracle beside which they have 
hushed their voices ; no dream which has once been enter- 
tained by actual human minds, nothing about which they 
have ever been passionate or expended time and zeal,' seems 
to have come to pass under our very eyes at last, and to 
suggest to us a tolerance even for those who have destroyed — 
yes, here in Perugia, too — so much that was fair. How if, 
after all, these soldiers from the North were but the uncon- 
scious agents of a profound Humanism, to which the dead 
seem as passionate, as insistent, as the living, in whose hearts 
even to-day Paganism is not more uncertain than Christianity, 
since the saints are only gods whose spirits have awakened, 
withering their beauty and their comeliness in a world that 
has seen a star 1 

Well, it is not such thoughts, be sure, you will hear from 
the kindly monks of S. Pietro. The church is a basilica 
with nave and aisles and small transepts. Benedetto da 
Montepulciano made the roof, which is gaudy and not worthy 
-of notice ; and for the most part the pictures are feeble and 
bad. 

Over the high altar of S. Pietro dei Cassinesi Perugino's 
Assumption used to stand, but it is gone to the North to- 
gether with Raphael's ' Ansidei ' Madonna, now in the National 
Gallery, which used to hang in S. Fiorenzo, and the Sposa- 



16 THE CITIES OF UMBRIA 

lizio by Lo Spagna, which was in the Cappella del S. Anello 
in the cathedral. The monks tell you that the choir stalls 
are decorated from Raphael's designs ; it is hard to believe it. 
The view from the gallery at the end of the choir is very 
lovely, embracing as it does the whole valley of Spoleto. 
In the north aisle is a Pieta by Bonfigli, of a curious beauty ; 
and a lovely altar-piece by Mino da Fiesole, over which is a 
circular Madonna and Child by Pintoricchio, now ruined. 
The sacristy holds five panels by Perugino of SS. Scholastica, 
Ercolano, Pietro Vincioli, the founder of the monastery, 
Costanzo, and ]\Iauro, which are part of Perugino's Resurrec- 
tion, now in Lyons. These lovely panels and the Bonfigli 
are surely sufficient excuse for a visit to S. Pietro. But in 
reality it is the quiet church itself that attracts us most. 
Built on the last spur of the hills it overlooks the immense 
valleys of the Tiber, and seems to command silence. Beyond, 
the vineyards and the olives sweep away to St. Mary of the 
Angels and the numberless cities, ruddy and white, of the 
valley of Spoleto ; while across the unshadowed fields where 
the sun marches in glory and splendour, S. Pietro speaks 
to S. Francesco, and S. Francesco to S. Feliciano, and S. 
Feliciano to S. Maria Assunta, and so on to Rome where, 
over the sadness of the Campagna, St. Peter broods on the 
fortunes of the world and the death of gods. 

It is in quite another part of the city that you find the 
only other church of any artistic interest — the Oratory of 
S. Bernardino, and that is but a shell like S. Ercolano. 
Passing under the Municipio, down the picturesque and 
almost mediaeval Via dei Priori, where one turns back 
many times to see the roofs piled up into heaven and the 
arches of many a shadowy street; after passing the Torre 
degli Scirri, a thirteenth-century tower left alone of all 
those belonging to the private families of the city ; past more 
than one church, too, of little or no interest, you come out at 



PERUGIA 17 

last into the Piazza di San Francesco, where stands in ruined 
splendour the fa9ade of S. Bernardino, perhaps the master- 
piece of Agostino Ducci the Florentine. Built in 1461 by 
the magistrates of Perugia in gratitude to S. Bernardino for 
his efforts for peace and brotherly love among a people so 
disposed the other way, it is certainly one of the most 
charming of the coloured architectural works of Italy. 
Above, God the Father in glory, with two kneeling angels 
and eight cherubim ; beneath, two griffins ; and there in a 
flaming mandorla, surrounded by angels, is S. Bernardino, 
together with scenes in relief from the saint's life, one of 
which represents him preaching at Aquila while a star shines 
over him at midday. Many angels and virtues and 
arabesques, exquisite in their perfect style and beauty, finish 
the work. 

S. Bernardino of Siena, whom this splendid monument 
commemorates, is one of the most pathetic figures of the 
fifteenth century. He was a true disciple of St. Francis. 
Born at Massa in 1380 of a noble family of Siena, he was an 
orphan before he was seven years old. He seems to have 
been brought up by his aunt Diana. The usual rather dis- 
agreeable stories are told of his childhood — stories common 
to all the saints, so that you wonder, hearing them, that 
those who in their earliest years were so commonplace and 
pious attained to such strength and sweetness in age. At 
eleven years old he was sent to Siena to school, where even 
then he seems to have attracted people by reason of a certain 
dignity in him. Yet he did not escape from the touch of 
the brutality of his day, though he shamed that man who 
Avould have injured him. At the age of seventeen, after 
a study of civil and canon law, he enrolled himself in the 
confraternity of Our Lady in the hospital of S. Maria della 
Scala to serve the sick : and it was here, after some years 
of discipline in the sorrows of the world, that he too heard 

B 



18 THE CITIES OF UMBRIA 

the implacable voice calling him to the difficult way of 
service. Service for man, for this our world, it is the 
inspiration of S. Bernardino's life as it was of the lives of 
St. Francis and St. Catherine of Genoa. In the year 1400 
a frightful pestilence, that had already wasted many another 
city of Italy, fell on Siena. ' These pestilences were no un- 
common thing in that age of brilliant genius and bloodshed. 
It was from such a plague that Boccaccio, in the Decameron^ 
withdraws his knights and ladies in order that they may 
live and tell many lovely tales full of piteous and laughing 
words. But for S. Bernardino there was no such escape. 
He had heard some voice, and seen the dying and the dead 
too often to look perhaps at the sun again without a kind of 
shame. So, together with twelve young men,' he served the 
sick, expecting heaven. During four months he seems to 
have managed the hospital with great skill, and to have 
shown a practical ability not rare in the lives of the saints. 
For it is the mistake of much popular criticism to think of 
the saints as dreamers almost incapable of action. The lives 
of St. Francis, St. Catherine of Siena, St. Teresa, and St. 
Dominic seem to have been forgotten, or remembered only 
for a certain mysticism which, of course, the mass of men fails 
to understand. But these great saints were in reality as 
great in action as in thought; they accomplished many 
marvellous things — as St. Catherine the return of the Pope 
to Rome from Avignon, or St. Teresa the reconstruction of 
an entire Order. 

And so shortly we find S. Bernardino, having done much 
for Siena, retiring to a little house without the city, where 
the walls of his garden shut out the world. It v/as after this 
that he took the habit of the Order of St. Francis at a convent 
of Observants not far from the city. He made his profession, 
September 8, 1404, on his birthday, which was the birthday 
also of Madonna Mary, whom he served so eagerly. In 



PERUGIA 19 

ragged garments he went through the streets while the crowd 
laughed at him, and, seeing one whom they knew to be of 
noble family in the same condition with themselves, threw 
stones at him ; while his friends, in shame at the figure he 
cut, pressed him to return with them. But he had heard the 
very voice of Christ whispering in the sunshine and the heat : 
' My son, behold Me hanging upon the cross : if thou lovest 
Me and art desirous to imitate Me, thou also must be fastened 
to thy cross ; thou also must follow Me, and surely thou shalt 
find Me.' Gradually he came to understand his true voca- 
tion as the orator of God. He too practised an art, the art 
of preaching and affecting the hearts of men, the secret of 
which he, as St. John of the Cross, that insatiable Spaniard, 
found was just an ardent love. For a single word spoken by 
love was, he knew, more powerful than any eloquence, the 
profound longing of the heart speaking to the heart with a 
kind of irresistible sincerity. And those who heard him 
loved him. 

In all that terrible age of slaughter and pestilence, and the 
awakening of the destructive intelligence of man, he was 
really a sort of peacemaker, pleading — at times not unsuccess- 
fully — for love between men, seeing that He Avhom he served 
had spent so much love for them. So the word of God that 
he heard in the valleys silent and fair, or in the beautiful 
streets of the immaculate city, or in dreams and dawns while 
men slept, pale and lovely as the days that pass so quietly 
over little children, became for him a consuming fire, a 
flaming and lovely sword, a swift and terrible hammer, 
breaking the hardest rocks. And he was a very flame, con- 
suming all that was not passion. Dullness of heart — it was 
his proclaimed enemy. One seems to hear him crying down 
the centuries from the passionate streets, now dying or dead, 
of Perugia or Siena : ' ye sons of men, how long will ye 
be dull of heart ! ' The name of Jesus was to him as mar- 



20 THE CITIES OF UMBRIA 

vellous as the name of our beloved, for when it was 
whispered to him, or he dared to utter it, a thousand little 
flames shook within him and he became almost beside him- 
self. For this cause Pope Martin v. sent for him more than 
once to examine him, but dismissed him with a blessing, 
offering him also in 1427 the Bishopric of Siena, as did Pope 
Eugenius iii. that of Ferrara, and later that of Urbino — all of 
which honours he refused, since his diocese was the world, 
his parish Italy. Being at Ancona and hearing that 
Perugia was in arms against herself, he did not hesitate to 
hasten thither and proclaim that God had sent him ' as His 
angel ' to proclaim peace on earth to men of good will. Nor 
was he unsuccessful ; for they ' forgave one another, desiring 
to live in peace and to pass to the Eight Hand.' Later, from 
that little pulpit on the wall of S. Lorenzo, he watched 
Perugia at his bidding burn her books, the false hair of the 
women, the beautiful pictures, full of desire and life, of the 
great lords. His influence, at least for a time, over the 
hearts of these fierce, strong men can scarcely be exaggerated ; 
he ruled Perugia for a moment by love, being himself a very 
flame of love. In 1438 he was appointed vicar-general of 
the Observants in Italy, and during the five years he held 
that office set about a reformation. He then returned 
to Siena, and being on the road, ever preaching, came to 
Aquila in the Abruzzi, where he was taken ill of fever, dying 
on the 20th May 1444. He was buried there in that little 
far city, and was canonised by Nicholas v. in 1450. Thus 
ended a life as necessary, as typical of that strange fifteenth 
century, as that of any painter or tyrant. His art was Love, 
as theirs was Beauty or Power, nor was he less strict in his 
service. Perugia at least would be less passionate without 
him, for amid all the splendour and beauty, the blood and 
the pestilence, the passion of his century, there in the dust 
and dirt we find the lilies of his love. 




VICOLO S. AGNESE, PERUGIA 



PERUGIA 21 

It is difficult to tear oneself awgy from thoughts of S. 
Bernardino while looking at the beautiful monument that 
the Perugians built in memory of him. Close by is the 
ruined church of S. Francesco, where Jie lodged on his visits 
to Perugia, and where hung his favourite bell 'Viola.' Some 
ancient frescoes of the school of Giotto are all that remain 
of beauty to the old church. 

Not far from S. Bernardino, towards the Via dei Priori, 
is the little church of S. Agata, memorable only for its door- 
way, which is the sole remnant of Lombard work in the 
city. 

The little church of S. Martino, easily reached from the 
Piazza di San Francesco by the Via della Siepe, Via del Poggio, 
Via Francolina, Via Armonica, and Via Verzaro, has a beauti- 
ful altar-piece by Manni and a Crucifixion of the school of 
Perugino. Thence to the Via Appia is but a step. This 
picturesque street is one of the most curious in the city. 
Passing down it you come into the Piazza Ansidei on the 
right, and thus into the Via Vecchia, at the bottom of which 
is the magnificent Arch of Augustus, the lower part of 
which is undoubtedly Etruscan. Passing thence up the Corso 
Garibaldi, and turning to the right just before you come to 
the Porta Sant' Angelo, you find the church of S. Angelo, 
a little round Romanesque building of the earlier part of the 
thirteenth century. It stands on the supposed site of a 
Temple of Venus, whence were taken the pillars for S. 
Pietro. Behind the high altar is a great stone, itself an 
altar to Marcus Aurelius, while the curious fresco La 
Madonna del Verde is certainly one of the earliest in 
Perugia. The lovely gate Porta Sant' Angelo is well worth 
seeing, with its Ghibelline battlements ; it was part of a castle 
of Fortebraccio. It is here that St. Francis and St. Dominic 
are said to have met on their way to Pope Honorius, then 
in Perugia. 



22 THE CITIES OF UMBRIA 

In the convent of S. Agnese, till lately only open to women, 
bnt now, by special permission of the Pope, open to all, there 
are three frescoes attributed to Perugino. The delightful 
garden of the nuns, full of old-world flowers and herbs, is 
perhaps as charming as the frescoes. It is horrible to think 
that in a short time those poor old women, utterly ignorant 
of the ways of the world, will be turned into the streets. 
But modern Italy has no pity for Eeligious ; and so with the 
rest those harmless souls, with their wondering, frightened 
eyes and confiding, loving ways, must be beggared to satisfy 
the lust for spoil of the new monarchy. It is the least 
admirable characteristic of a government which is certainly 
not beloved. 

Through many delightful byways you may' wander round 
the walls of Perugia, coming upon Etruscan boulders or 
Roman brick and stone, or later additions of the destroying 
centuries. And go where you will, always you will find 
something to delight you, something that is too simple or 
too beautiful for any land but this. For here is Italia 
Mystica, full of lovely and magical cities and the byways of 
the Saints. 






y/ ''- ^^^i ,^^ 




CAPPELLA DEI PELLEGRINI ASSISI 



n 

ASSIST 

I 

ASSISI is the city of St. Francis. It is impossible to 
think of anything but his simple and lovely life within 
the walls of what is really a great shrunken village, lean and 
emaciated with years and the ecstasies of the spiritual life. 
The little town has itself become a Eeligious, and has 
attained to a profound annihilation in God. Up and down 
its silent streets wander divine expectancies, a little sad and 
pessimistic, and yet beautiful withal, because long and long 
ao'o Jesus of Nazareth seemed to have returned to His earth. 
One finds oneself alone with the twelfth and thirteenth 
centuries and all that they have bequeathed and stored for 
us within the walls of this softly coloured city, warm with 
divine love, ruddy with the pale coloured life of Subasio, 
from whose side she has, as it were, been hewn, with only so 
simple a rearrangement of the stones as will allow of life, 
while one contemplates the story of Jesus of Nazareth or St. 
Francis of Assisi. Hallowed by the tears and the footsteps, 
sorrowful and bleeding, of many thousands of pilgTims, she 
has grown lovely under their love, beautiful in some exquisite 
Christian manner with the sorrows that the world has laid at 
her feet for hundreds of years now ; a simple country virgin, 
very pure and innocent, who has had but one lover, Christ 
her Lord. Eome, the insatiable mistress of innumerable 
Gods and Kings, and Dreams and Tyrants and Liberty, who, 
years and years ago before Assisi was born, dreamed of the 

23 



24 THE CITIES OF UMBRIA 

strange divine figure of Christ, and desired Him, leading 
Him and His dream away as captives and laying at His feet 
the empire of the world, when, after more than a thousand 
years, she saw Him arise again still unchanged, still the lover 
of Love, humble and untouched by beauty in this quiet 
country place, she came to Him, well, almost as a suppliant, 
conquered by His simplicity, finding in just that something 
indestructible, something that would support her in her pro- 
foundest tragedy; so that the Pope, amid all the uncouth and 
yet Roman splendour of courts and courtly ways, sees St. 
Francis upholding the Church which is about to fall, and 
again later sees him, well, as another Son of God, with divine 
and simple love radiant in his face, and the strange wounds 
that the world has inflicted upon him, gaping insistent in his 
hands, his feet, his side. It was indeed a vision of the Son 
of God that Rome, dreaming in the chamber of the Bride- 
groom, beheld suddenly in that mysterious century, and 
awaking found him gone, wandering in country places as of 
old, divine love himself, simple and lonely as a star shining 
over Assisi. And to-day, as always, there is nothing, can be 
nothing in Assisi but just that. Goethe, the pioneer as it 
were of the modern world, beautiful as a god, content with 
nothing save beauty — visible, tangible beauty, for the most 
part — coming to Assisi from Rome, in some unaccountable 
way, blinded perhaps by the splendour and the strength of 
Rome and Roman thoughts, missed it all : the very spirit of 
the divine village, its ever-living beauty, its humanism ; pre- 
ferring the beautiful little Temple of Minerva, which is still 
divine but with quite another kind of beauty. Well, that was 
perhaps one of the limitations of his genius, northern as it 
was, choosing rather the far-fetched greatness, the eloquent 
renown of the Rose of Rome than the Lily of Love, white and 
immaculate in the fields, that was beautiful after all, chiefly 
for country people, shepherds, and goatherds, or the labourers 



ASSIST 25 

in the vineyards who had never seen the crimson majesty 
of the immortal city, splendid with swords. He perhaps, 
being of the North, feared the mysticism so likely to 
conquer even so converted a barbarian as himself, and in 
that great refusal we see perhaps the first suggestion of his 
limitations. 

As you come to Assisi from Perugia along that old and 
fair way down the hillsides pleasant with olives, into the 
immense valley of Spoleto, just before the little village of 
Ponte S. Giovanni, you come upon the immense tombs of 
the Volumnii, an Etruscan Necropolis of about 150 B.C. It 
suggests at once to the traveller the depth of antiquity 
around him, seeing that almost by chance as it were he has 
come upon the dust of men of whom we know nothing, or 
next to nothing, whose very language we cannot read, whose 
legend we cannot decipher. They too had their heroes and 
their gods, tragic in their deaths, immortal in the beauty of 
men's thoughts concerning them. Tall Troy, whose topless 
towers crash through the centuries, had gates for them, 
before which we too have waited for a glimpse of Helen 
whose beauty launched the beautiful ships, whose love 
shattered the world. Was it not here that Troilus died, and 
Hector in his despair left his perfect wife never to return 1 
Iphigenia, the daughter of Agamemnon with the shoulders 
of ivory, is almost sacrificed, and Charon waits with his 
boat just touching the sands of life ; and the human sacrifice 
that in all ages has fascinated the minds of men is found 
here too, the victim held down by the hair upon the 
altar, the priest as ever the slayer, ready with his weapon. 
Well, even so long ago men, it seems, were entranced by 
just life; as now^ so of old, we appeased the gods, we 
went forth to battle, we loved, we laughed, and were in 
despair. 

As you drive over the beautiful plain towards Assisi, in the 



26 THE CITIES OF UMBEIA 

footsteps of many armies, it is such thoughts that entice you 
from the sweet monotony of the way. And suddenly and 
in a moment, if you are fortunate, you are involved in the 
simple splendour of some procession between the fields — 
Madonna in all her robes carried before an adoring people, 
while the fields and the vines, the corn and the olives 
quicken before her gracious coming, and the chant of the 
boys, the immortal words of the priest, persuade you that 
as always men go forth until the evening and think of the 
wind and are subject to the sun and watch the clouds ; 
sowing and reaping because the light is sweet and morning 
a pleasant thing, and time and chance happen to all. And 
gradually you understand that it was in this place that 
St. Francis was born and lived and died ; that his footsteps 
have silenced the tramping of Caesar's armies ; that his 
gentle feet have bled along this very way. No splendour 
that came after — the pale, bloodless face, beautiful with the 
tragedy of sin, terrible with ambition, weary for sleep, of 
Cesare Borgia, or the carnival armies, Gothic, wonderful, of 
Charles viii. of France, or any majesty or renown, has ever 
been strong enough to rase out his remembrance or to crush 
the flowers that lifted their heads in the summer days to catch 
the wind of his coat. And almost before you are aware 
St. Mary of the Angels stands before you, like a tall and 
perfect lily, waiting to give you something of the fragrance 
she has kept through all the centuries. For in aU the valley 
of Spoleto there is none like to her. Standing as she does 
in the midst of the plain the sun kisses her with the soft 
kisses of the hills, transfiguring her with his glory. She 
guards a holy place, the Porziuncola and the cell where 
St. Francis died. It is said that the little chapel over which 
the great church has arisen was built by four unknown 
pilgrims, so that they might place in safety a relic of the 
tomb of the Blessed Virgin which they had brought from 



ASSIST 27 

Jerusalem. It has also been said that on the night of 
September 26, 1182, in which St. Francis was born, the 
angels' songs were heard here as on the birthday of Christ 
in the fields near Bethlehem. So legends grow in an old 
mysterious land where saints have walked ; and especially 
here in Assisi, because in everything the legend of St. Francis 
must conform to the legend of Christ. But however it may 
have been with those pilgrims of the fourth century, St. 
Benedict, in the earlier part of the sixth, finding the place 
in decay and almost abandoned, rebuilt it for the monks of 
his Order, and called it Porziuncola — the little portion, because 
it was so small among the Benedictine foundations. And so 
when St. Francis came he also found the place in ruin, and 
having repaired S. Damiano, rebuilt this little church also, 
and begged the Benedictine abbot of Monte Subasio to give 
it to himj the which he did on condition that it should always 
be the mother-house of the Franciscan Order. Well, as you 
find the place to-day, rough and rude enough to prove the 
legend true, if you were inclined to doubt it, it is, I think, 
perhaps the most touching place in all Italy in its simplicity 
and littleness. The sumptuous and huge church which covers 
it is lost sight of beside so small a thing, and you find your- 
self won almost against your will by its sweet country face 
that has seen St. Francis singing the Office, and indeed been 
built by him and heard his voice and felt his tears and 
watched him die. As I came on one of the unforgettable and 
lovely days of my life — itself perhaps the loveliest — to St. Mary 
of the Angels from Perugia, the sun shone all the way, and 
'the flowers were breaking in waves of blue and white and 
gold over the valley, for it was May. A friar, speaking my 
dear mother tongue to a pilgrim who would hardly let him 
go, came smiling towards me, and with the simpleness and 
kindness common in Italy, led me found the sacred church. 
To him it was a work of infinite pleasure, he assured me, 



28 THE CITIES OF UMBRIA 

and yet I cannot but think that it must often have been 
tedious. Almost all his world that he showed with such 
eager courtesy was fairyland to so many of his guests. 
' They do not understand, they do not understand,' was his 
excuse for them. Well, to me at least, it seemed difficult to 
misunderstand so expressive a place. Under the great dome 
of St. Mary's stands the Porziuncola, a modern fresco of 
no merit at all over the little west entrance ; a fresco by 
Perugino, robbed of all its sweetness by restoration and 
disaster, in the like position at the east end. A fresco of 
Fiorenzo di Lorenzo used to be on the wall here, but it has 
been sold. 

You may hear Mass in the Porziuncola very simply at ten 
o'clock every morning, and surely in that dim and fragrant 
chapel there could be no more fitting mystery. Over an 
altar to the left of the nave and to the left of the chapel 
of the Blessed Sacrament is a beautiful work in the terra- 
cotta of the della Eobbia. In the midst Madonna is crowned, 
while to the left St. Francis receives the stigmata, to the 
right St. Jerome in a vision sees Christ on the Cross. 
Beneath are a lovely Annunciation, a Nativity, and Adora- 
tion of the Magi. The friar then leads you back across the 
nave of the great church to the tiny room in which St. 
Francis died. Outside there is a panel painted with a 
portrait of St. Francis by Giunta Pisano. The panel is said 
to have been part of the bier on which he was carried to 
S. Chiara. On the altar, very dim and withdrawn till the 
friar lights a taper, is a lovely statue of St. Francis by 
Luca della Eobbia. It is one of the most beautiful things 
in Assisi — the sweet emaciated face, the spare but exquisite 
hands, the profound expressiveness of the work, hold you 
all day beyond even the frescoes at S. Francesco. One is 
slow to look at the frescoes, by Lo Spagna, of the twelve 
disciples of St. Francis that cover the walls of this tiny 



ASSISI 29 

cell, for the face of the Saint haunts one. In truth, it must 
have been so that Christ appeared when He was exceeding 
sorrowful ; it might stand for a statue of Man, seeing that it 
expresses certainly that which has captured the world. The 
friar shows yow also the cord which the saint wore round 
his habit stained with blood. But even the pilgrim cannot 
turn to this from the perfection and beauty of the statue 
without reluctance. No nobler statue did Luca ever make 
in that humble way of his, interested as he always was 
in the simpler and less splendid things, even in his material, 
which, for the most part, was neither marble nor stone but 
just earth, from which he contrived infinite beauty. 

I passed out of the cell where St. Francis died into the 
sumptuous modern sacristy with something of a shock, to 
find the walls panelled in woodAVork, carved curiously, of 
the sixteenth century. There I found a lovely half-length 
Christ by Perugino, perhaps a genuine work of his ; and yet 
it is, I venture to think, doubtful. There is a little chapel 
on the right where is an early picture of St. Francis, attri- 
buted to Giunta Pisano. It is said to have been painted on 
a plank of the saint's bed. 

And so we came into the rose garden ; it is, perhaps, 
something of a disappointment. It may well be we had 
expected too much, but it is railed in so securely and it 
is so small that St. Francis must have had much ado to 
roll in it at all. No doubt pious hands must be kept 
from pious theft. One remembers the story of the wedding- 
ring at Perugia — and yet, and yet. . . . 'Well,' said the friar, 
' this is Saint Francis's Rose Garden. One night he was 
tempted, oh, tempted of the devil, and so he came into this 
little garden, which was full of briars ; there he rolled among 
the thorns, but they suddenly burst into flower, and always 
they grow without thorns now. If we take them away 
either they die,' he said sorrowfully, 'or thej^ grow with 



30 THE CITIES OF UMBRIA 

thorns. Either they die or they grow with thorns,' he 
repeated sorrowfully. And in answer to some question, 
' they blossom in June and are red. It was in January 
that this miracle happened,' he continued softly, 'and his 
angel led him to the altar of Porziuncola and he saw 
Madonna and the angels, and Christ on His Throne in 
Heaven.' 

But it is the Cappella delle Rose, which St. Bonaventura 
built over a cave where St. Francis would spend much time 
in prayer, that is really of great interest. There in the 
tiny sanctuary are the frescoes of a pupil of Perugino or 
Pintoricchio, Tiberio d'Assisi, which show something of the 
oversweetness of those masters — Perugino's sentimentality, 
Pintoricchio's delight in pretty faces — and yet' they seem in 
place in this tiny chapel which is, after all, a sanctuary of 
sentiment. For around St. Francis, that little poor man of 
Assisi, the world — Catholic, Protestant, Agnostic, or what 
you will — has gushed now for many years. But the world 
does not understand him. His profoundly mystical soul, 
simple only in love and the limitations of his experience, 
has entranced the Protestant chiefly because he has come 
to think of Christ as a kind of adorable Free-thinker, and of 
St. Francis as a forerunner of Martin Luther. In my short 
study of his life, in another part of this book, I have 
tried to correct such misplaced enthusiasm, and to show St. 
Francis as the loyal son of the Catholic Church, which he 
ever looked upon as his Mother and his Father. Concerned 
for the most part as he was with the reality of the spiritual 
life and with poverty, nothing would ha^^e disgusted him more 
than the enthusiastic sentimentality of those who, without 
understanding either him or his faith, come to worship him. 
Fountains of scent, oceans of unmeaning sentimental tears 
begin to surround his legend ; a brutal excitement, a feeble 
consternation infest even the quiet spot where he lived and 



Assist 31 

died ; while a Protestant Frenclaman has made his fame out of 
this saint of the Catholic Church, certainly to the satisfaction 
of the innumerable women who, with sighs, with outpouring 
of unsatisfied dreams, stay at Assisi or Perugia for a few 
d&ys, on their way to and from Eome and Florence. Yes, 
St. Francis has conquered the world, but his victory would 
have made him weep. 



II 

The way from St. Mary of the Angels to Assisi is a plea- 
sant way if you go by the byways through the vineyards and 
olive gardens. It is hot and dusty by the road, but the two 
miles which separate the great church from the city are 
charming, with their mighty views up the valley of Spoleto 
and back towards Perugia and down the valley of the Tiber. 
Piled up on itself, as it were, the little town glows in the 
sunlight almost like some precious rosy stone. You are 
attracted from the first hy its homely face, its old-world 
simplicity, its placid brows. Many beggars haunt you with 
their frightful troubles; you are dazzled by their agonies, 
their importunity, their simple faith in their own miseries 
as their saviours. The sun almost persuades you that you 
have wandered into the forgotten centuries; the hum of 
the summer, the voices of the beggars, the dust and the 
light seem like a dream. It is out of all this that you 
come quite suddenly into the cool darkness of the lower 
church of S. Francesco. It seems more like a fortress than 
a' church as you climb the hill, built as it is on arches of 
stone against the hillside ; but as you enter you seem 
to have wandered back into the North with its twilight 
churches, where the sun never shines and they worship God 
in semi-darkness. And, indeed, it is not till evening that 
the level light of the setting sun throws a glory over the 



32 THE CITIES OF UMBRIA 

splendour that in the morning is rather felt than seen. 
S. Francesco is the mighty and splendid tomb of the little 
poor man, who should have been buried in the lee of some 
wood where birds sing, and the earth is carpeted in 
spring with primroses. Built by Frate Elias in memory 
and honour of his master, it will in reality ever remain his 
own monument, on which the masters of the Roman school, 
Pietro Cavallini and his pupils, Giotto and his pupils, and 
Simone Martini did not hesitate to lavish their genius. 
Originally, it would appear, nothing more than a nave, choir, 
and small transepts — indeed, very like to the upper church 
as we see it to-day — gradually, during the thirteenth and 
fourteenth centuries, the chapels were added, while Giotto 
himself is said to have built the Campanile. The great 
monastery beside the church was built, too, in the thir- 
teenth century; it was secularised in 1566, and but few 
friars remain to guard the very precious memories of the 
Order. The church, however, is in the hands of the Con- 
ventuals of the Franciscan Order, and not, as St. Mary of 
the Angels, in the hands of the Friars Minor. 

There is a wealth of precious work in the church — frescoes 
of Pietro Cavallini, untouched save by the hand of Time ; 
magnificent Giottos, and frescoes of his school; Simone 
Martinis of surpassing loveliness, and it may be an Ottaviano 
Nelli. It is here, perhaps, better than anywhere else in 
Italy, that the beginnings of Italian Art can be studied. 
It is the irony of fate that the darkness which infests the 
church should make a sight of all the splendour so difficult. 
I shall content myself here with writing of the more 
important things without attempting to speak of every- 
thing in the church. There is a number of tombs quite 
uninteresting to the ordinary traveller, such as that of the 
Queen of Cyprus, who died in Assisi in 1240. It will be 
sufficient to notice the frescoes, not adequately, but as 



ASSISI 33 

adequately as is possible, in a book concerned after all with 
other things beside Assisi. 

To the left of the entrance is a Madonna with St. Francis 
and St. Antony the Abbot, and some Bishop, attributed to 
Ottaviano Nelli, that strangely feeble representative of the 
school of Grubbio ; his mediocre work we may find at Foligno 
and at Gubbio. He is supposed to have taught Gentile da 
Fabriano, since that painter in his youth, according to Vasari, 
painted at Gubbio. But while Gentile's work is always, or 
nearly always, strong and lovely, Ottaviano's never seems to 
rise above a sort of helplessness, nerveless and provincial. 

As you pass into the nave of the great church the darkness 
is deeper. The first chapel on the left, S. Martino, has been 
painted in fresco by Simone Martini with scenes from the 
life of S. Martino. Simone Martini was born probably in 
Siena in -1.283. He was the pupil of Duccio, and not, so 
far as his work tells us, much influenced by Giotto — certainly 
not his pupil. Far more in sympathy with the intentions, as 
yet unexpressed, 'of Umbrian art than with those of Florence, 
already pointed out by Giotto, he at least felt and, indeed, 
expressed very beautifully the splendour and magnificence 
of life, the sheer loveliness of our world. For painting, as 
such, for its problems and difficulties, unlike Giotto, he had 
no care. He has been called 'the most lovable of all the 
Italian artists before the Renaissance,' and, indeed, looking 
on the strange beauty of his work here, in the Cappella di 
San Martino, who can doubt if? He is so much sweeter 
than Giotto ; has, indeed, a sense of beauty subtler than, 
though not so profound as his. Is there anything in all 
pre-Eenaissance art more exquisite than these frescoes where 
St. Martin divides his cloak with a beggar, and later, as he 
lies asleep, has a vision of Christ wearing that very cloak ? 
And best of all, perhaps, that wonderful piece of work in 
which we see the young St. Martin girded with the sword 
c 



34 THE CITIES OF UMBRIA 

and all the accoutrements of knighthood, his hands clasped 
in prayer. The gaiety of all that — for even to-day in Italy 
religion is not without a sense of joy quite other than that 
sombre and unctuous pleasantness we have caught from the 
Germans— the beauty of the young men who look on, the 
splendour and magnificence of the emperor, the loveliness 
of the thought, the perfection of the craft ! A great painter, 
you might almost feel inclined to sa.y till you think of the 
impassioned work of Giotto, and all it meant to Italy, and 
means to us. And yet Simone Martini is a great painter, 
though scarcely an original painter as Giotto is. He was 
content to carry out the ideas of his master Duccio, by 
whom he seems always to have been overshadowed. There 
is nothing of the immense vitality of the Florentine. When 
his young men stretch out their arms, as in this fresco, you 
do not feel as though they might embrace you, as you do 
with Giotto over and over again. To him life was a kind 
of picture, a little unreal but wonderfully decorative and very 
beautiful, in which nothing so indiscreet as movement, the 
very significance of life itself, must ever come.^ It might be 
said that he was the most beautiful illustrator of the Book 
of Life in all the pre-Renaissance, but the whole vitality and 
reality of life were in the text. One looks on these frescoes 
always with new joy, but never with the profound exulta- 
tion with which one gazes at Giotto's work here and else- 
where. St. Martin, in the upper end of the frescoes, is 
ordained and retires to Albenga ; he preaches in some city, 
possibly Chartres; he restores a child to life, and at last 
dies. In all this work, too detailed to describe, one finds the 
same sense of entrancing beauty. And so when in 1344 

1 Professor Langton Douglas reminds me of Simone's much repainted 
equestrian portrait of Guidoriccio da Fogliano. ' No knight of the 
Renaissance,' he truly says, * save Colleoni and Gattemalata moves 
more surely and irresistibly towards his enemy. ' 



ASSISI 35 

Simone Martini came to die, he had at any rate saved thus 
much for us from all the visions of his life. Content with 
beauty, and with beauty only, life came to him always as 
a perfect mistress — a little fantastic, a Jittle unreal, but with 
grace, with charm, with joy; he has told us of her — well, 
after all, as he had been taught to do. 

Opposite the Cappella di San Martino is the Chapel of the 
Blessed Sacrament; fortunately, the frescoes attributed to 
Dono Doni are of no artistic interest. The next chapel on 
this side is that of St. Antony of Padua, which also contains 
nothing to keep the traveller. The next chapel, however, 
that of S. Maria Maddalena, is intensely interesting. It 
contains frescoes, by a pupil of Giotto, representing the 
legend of St. Mary Magdalen and St. Mary of Egypt. One 
may see here the condition of painting about the time of 
Giotto's death. The roof is painted with figures of Christ, 
Lazarus, St. Mary Magdalen, and St. Mary of Egypt. 
Below we find the Raising of Lazarus, and Christ in the 
house of Simon, where St. Mary anointed His feet, the 
Noli me tangere, and St. Mary miraculously coming to 
Marseilles, where, the legend says, she and Lazarus and 
Martha founded a church. In the lunettes are the Com- 
munion, Zosimus giving St. Mary of Egypt his clothes, 
and St. Mary Magdalen carried to heaven. Attributed to 
Buffalmacco, these frescoes are undoubtedly the work of 
a careful disciple of Giotto. Who he was I know not. But 
they are unmistakably Giottesque ; the finest of the series, 
and the nearest to Giotto's own work, being the Noli me 
tangere. How difi'erent is this humble yet enthusiastic work 
from the exquisite eloquence of Simone Martini! 

Coming now to the high altar, around which are the 
beautiful works of Giotto himself, we are face to face with 
the most important paintings in the church. In the tomb 
below the altar, in the rock of the mountain itself, hidden 



36 THE CITIES OF UMBHIA 

there for six hundred years, lies the body of St. Francis ; 
while above Giotto has told, with a sincerity and a genius 
never perhaps equalled, the story of the Poverello's triumph. 
This spot is really the centre of Assisi ; it is in itself almost 
the reason for the existence of the city. Very difficult to see 
because of the darkness and the anxiety of the friars that 
one should not tread upon the steps of the altar over the 
tomb of the saint, the light — such as it is — is, I think, best 
in the afternoon, when the sun streams through the great 
windows of the choir. It is, however, extremely disappoint- 
ing that these, among the noblest works of Giotto, should 
be so invisible. To the west you see the Mystical Marriage 
of St. Francis with Lady Poverty. Christ Himself marries 
them; while Poverty, in tatters, stands among the flowers 
and thorns. On her left is Charity, who gives her a burning 
heart ; on her right Faith hands her a ring. Of the crowd 
which watches this most strange wedding, part is scornful, 
but part is full of understanding. But at the feet of Poverty 
a dog barks, a boy pelts her with stones, and even a child 
thrusts at her with a stick. A kind of fear seems to possess 
the crowd, and it is for this cause they hate her. Among 
the crowd itself many kind or malicious, simple or worldly 
actions may be found ; the whole picture is, as it were, an 
action. Above, many angels await the end of this mystical 
wedding. 

To the south you see Chastity praying in a strong tower ; 
some knight is receiving baptism before putting on his 
armour; while Penance drives away a demon, St. Francis 
receives certain novices. A winged figure dressed as a monk 
drives away a woman, who seems to symbolise Desire, for 
she is blindfolded, and her feet are talons, while she is girt 
with human hearts, and her head is crowned with roses. 
Behind all comes Death. 

To the north you see Obedience betwixt Prudence and 



ASSISI 37 

Humility. Behind is a vision of Christ on the Cross, while 
before a friar kneels, holding a yoke upon which Obedience 
lays her hand, while with a gesture she commands silence. 

To the east you see St. Francis in Glory in the robe of 
the deacon, the dalmatic, seated on a throne surrounded by 
angels. 

These, the mature works of Giotto and his pupils, sur- 
rounded as they are in S. Francesco by the work of his 
predecessors and of his immediate followers, are of deep 
interest. Moreover, we may compare them with his own 
perfect work in the south transept and his early work in 
the Upper Church. In looking at them we may see the 
development of a great style — a style that dominated Italian 
art, and to a large extent insisted upon its adherence. 
While showing, as in all his work, an emancipation from 
the Byzantine manner, he is still a complete mystic, or, at 
least, immersed in allegory. He is not yet so much con- 
cerned with the expression of life as with the expression 
of thought. The desire for beauty, almost for its own sake, 
so exquisitely expressed in the Sienese painters, Duccio and 
Simone Martini,, is by no means passionate with him. His 
people, his angels, his saints are seldom altogether lovely, 
only they have character, thoughtfulness, and, above all, 
life, in a way quite new — miraculously new, in a world con- 
cerned for the most pa,rt with lesser things. He was, 
perhaps, the first Naturalist — by which I do not mean that 
he was a Realist minutely copying Nature in every fragTaent 
of anatomy, but that, though he knows infinitely less than 
Michelangelo, I do not find much difference in their power 
of rendering the action of a limb, the turn of the head, for 
instance ; not so much difference, at any rate, as there is 
between Giotto and his predecessors. Even his drapery is 
naturalistic, it actually clothes living people. It is not there 
for its own sake only, beneath it life betrays itself. And 



38 THE CITIES OF UMBRIA 

though it is probably impossible to exaggerate Giotto's influ- 
ence on his art, he is, as these frescoes show so well, a 
profound mystic, a student of Dante, or, at least, influenced 
by his thought. These strange and scornful little figures in 
the foreground of his fresco, the Marriage of St. Francis with 
Lady Poverty, are not living figures but symbols, and though 
their gestures are very life to his subtle mind in a time that 
was still wrapped in dreams from which he almost alone in 
the world was awakening, that by no means robs them 
of their symbolism. Was it from him that Botticelli, cer- 
tainly as mystical, in an age so enthusiastic towards naturalism 
as that of the Renaissance, learned to take the Centaur quite 
simply as a symbol for Discord 1 G-reater, more fundamental, 
than all his contemporaries, and than most of' his successors, 
in his apprehension of life, as a decorative artist he is the 
equal, at least, of any man of his country. His genius 
dawned like a star on a world ignorant of its own perfection 
and completeness. He would seem to have achieved in a 
moment the antique point of view, all that was worth having, 
almost, that the world had lost during the terrible centuries 
of the Middle Age ; all that was essential, at least, in that 
old art ; and thus, sooner or later, to have assured us of our 
very selves, of the history of painting, of the direction and 
progress of Art. 

Looking at his Birth of Christ in the south transept of 
this church, or at the Salutation, or at the Miracle of 
St. Francis, who restores a dead child to life, we see, per- 
haps more easily, the extraordinary breadth of his genius — 
its curiosity, its profound poetry, its impassioned and simple 
energy and wisdom. Indeed, I think that Birth of Christ, 
by reason of a certain quietness and perfection, is the most 
marvellous thing in all the church in its achievement, its 
wisdom, its excellent beauty. Compare it in all its natural- 
ness with that early picture of Madonna and Child, which 



ASSISI 39 

has been given to so vague a painter — really a mere name — 
as Cimabue. It is lovely, and marks, how subtly, the change 
from the Byzantine to the manner of Giotto. Well, there is 
a more tremendous interval betweeij them than between 
Giotto and the school of Athens in the Vatican, or the 
frescoes of the Sistine Chapel. 

An inquiry, interesting, but for which there is no room 
in a work such as this, might be pursued as to the 
influence, even thus early, of Franco-Gothic art on Italian 
work. It is said to have been a certain Jacopo Tedesco, an 
architect in the service of Frederic ii., that Elias employed to 
build S. Francesco ; he was a monk from Lake Como, where 
lived a people more Gothic then even than now. He had 
already made mosaics for the Baptistery at Florence. Was 
it he who brought with him ideas that from Provence seem 
to have made their way north before anything of the sort is 
found in Italy ^ That art, which seems to have influenced 
Donatello so much later, in some unaccountable way is surely 
to be found even here too, but with a delicacy, a subtlety, 
so that it is easier to say, I feel it, than to assert, There it is. 

The Upper Church is a temple of colour and light. Of the 
same form as the Lower Church, save that it has no chapels, 
it gives us an idea of space and beauty such as we never 
receive in the Lower Church, where the low roof and the twi- 
light mask the frescoes, the chapels, the colour on wall and 
ceiling, and even the very church itself, in the sombre, 
mysterious night of the catacombs. But in the Upper Church 
all is changed ; it seems to glow like some perfect jewel, and 
almost to illumine itself rather than to receive light from the 
sun shining over the world outside. And it is here are preserved 
some of the most precious frescoes in Italy. Pietro Cavallini 
and his school have painted the roof with at least a perfect 
understanding of the decorative value of colour and design. 
We find Cavallini's work to-day in S. Maria in Trastevere, 



40 THE CITIES OF UMBRIA 

where in the Tribune certain mosaics by him, mentioned by 
Ghiberti, may still be seen. And lately frescoes of the Last 
Judgment, given to him by the newer criticism/ have been 
discovered in S. Cecilia in Trastevere. A pupil in the school 
of Rome, that school which under the Cosmati attained to so 
great a position in Rome, Cavallini and his pupils seem to 
owe very little to Byzantine influence, but to have learned 
almost all they knew from works of classical antiquity. 
Their chief claim upon our notice, after the exquisite quality 
of their own work, is that they purged Griotto's work of the 
Byzantine tradition which was paramount in Florence and 
Siena, and showed him the true source of all art, that 
marvellous antiquity which seemed to have disappeared so 
completely. Their work here in the Upper Church had an 
immense influence on Italian art. Over the choir, the four 
Evangelists, with their symbols and the Angel who should 
bring all things to their remembrance, speak to the four 
quarters of the world. Then in the nave we find Christ in 
benediction, the Blessed Virgin, St. John Baptist, and St. 
Francis. And in the vault at the west end, the four Doctors 
of the Catholic Church — St. Gregory with the Dove, St. 
Ambrose, St. Jerome, and St. Augustine. In the upper 
parts of the walls are painted scenes from the history of the 
world and the life of Christ ; utterly ruined, in a state of 
almost complete destruction, they are yet enough to prove to 
us the power of that Roman school which died so early and 
which has been so utterly forgotten. Even yet, we may see 
the strange influence of antiquity in those genii lurking so 
delightfully among the fruit and flowers ; are they not the 
ancient world itself almost in its lightness, its gaiety, its 
natural and yet fanciful beauty 1 It is here that we may see 
the human form, not in its perfection, but perfectly appre- 

•^ See Crowe and Cavalcaselle, edited by Langton Douglas and 
S. Arthur Strong (Murray, 1903), vol. i. p. 91. 



ASSISI 41 

hended, nevertheless, through the dimness of the Christian 
centuries ; not to reappear again till an Umbrian painter, 
a man so much greater than his fame, Luca Signorelli, 
suddenly confronts us with it, in all its splendour almost, in 
The Virgin holding Her Divine Son in Her Lap in the 
Uffizi, where the shepherds are surely the dear gods of 
Greece dispossessed on that musical night. In the four 
Doctors of the Church, in the last vault towards the west end 
of the nave, we find this painter of the Eoman school at his 
strongest. It is very obviously, it seems to me, the work of 
a man who was thinking in mosaic rather than in fresco — the 
immense dignity of the figures, and especially of the furni- 
ture, being really the inspiration of an artist in the more 
durable material. But after all, for us at least, slaves for the 
most part to our own sestheticisms, it is in the decorative 
value of "these frescoes that we shall find our deepest delight. 
They are perfect, at least as decoration, and the colour has 
grown magical with age. The same painter is supposed to 
have painted the walls in their upper parts, of which, how- 
ever, almost nothing remains but a lovely and ruined sugges- 
tion of precious colours on the damp walls. The influence 
upon Griotto of these works must have been very great. 
Working, he and his pupils, on the long spaces below these 
once majestic works, he could not have escaped their 
authority. Day by day as he worked on his frescoes of the 
Life of St. Francis, which it may well be are among his 
earliest works, these frescoes of an earlier master in all their 
beauty no doubt told him many a secret, confirming him in 
the way he desired to go, correcting his enthusiasm, and 
suggesting something of the exquisite dignity which we find 
in all his work. How magnificent, for instance, is the 
gesture of Pietro Bernadone in the fresco where St. Francis 
has been taken before the Bishop only to renounce his father 
for ever. How naturally, in another fresco — that of the 



42 THE CITIES OF UMBRIA 

death of the Lord of Celano — the saint rises in haste from the 
table where he is sitting ; how lovely are those angels who 
bear him to heaven, clothed in light, in the ruined picture of 
his death. Well, in all this there is doubtless something of 
the teaching of the older painter learned with a new spirit 
that was all G-iotto's own, that for some time, at any rate, he 
kept with him in his grave, but that was eventually to in- 
form all Tuscan art. These frescoes by the young Giotto, 
repainted though they may be, are still fulfilled with a 
majestic beauty. In their simplicity and naturalness they 
are of the centre of the movement that was soon to excite all 
Italy to enthusiasm. Earlier than his work in the Lower 
Church, they precede it as dawn anticipates noon, and they 
remain among the most precious things in Italy, strewn 
though she is with the triumphs of the world. 

Before leaving St. Francesco, it is delightful to pass down 
the dark nave of the Lower Church, through the Cappella di 
S. Antonio, to spend an hour in the cloistered Campo Santo, 
where the tall cypresses, like flameless tapers, tower over 
the dead. It is a place divided from the world, as certain days 
are from the rest of life, by an inviolable and sacred silence. 
One hour I spent there, snatched from the rest of life like a 
lily from the fingers of death, seems to me now, in the wastes 
of the years, the most precious of my life. Slowly in the 
soft air the cypresses sway under the sky, and in that little 
island of once, noiseless with the footsteps of the dead, all 
that is really precious in the world seems to have come to me 
graciously, silently obliterating everything else. Scarcely 
anything of sorrow is there in that tiny graveyard, and the 
brutal sentimentality of such a place of death, so vulgar and 
common with indifference in the North, is not to be found 
there. Oblivion has washed itself of iniquity in the summers 
of the earth, and those who once went up and down with 
so much charm and dignity and simple goodness, forgotten 



ASSISI 43 

though they be, do not resent an intrusion made for love, 
meditation, or refreshment. Waiting there for a great thing, 
which never comes perhaps, though it may be we there 
caught a glimpse of it for the first time, we seem to hear the 
years trampling over Assisi, with hushed feet, their wings 
furled, while the many armies pass by and the Popes and the 
Emperors quarrel or are friends, the North flows and ebbs 
again, the Saints grasp at heaven, and ever the Umbrian 
summer is as lovely, and men and women are loving in the 
world, and the sun shines, then as now. It is in some such 
vague dream as this that one loses oneself in a place so noise- 
less as to echo even our thoughts. 

It is really after many nights and days spent in her 
desolate piazzas, her awny palaces, and her silent, cool 
churches, that Assisi becomes for us something real, some- 
thing more visible than the life of her saint. The little 
Tempio di Minerva, close to the Palazzo Municipio, at the 
end of streets in which the grass ever seems to be on the 
point of growing, gradually becomes for us a thing of real 
beauty,, not merely the fabric of a vision. And as we wander 
up and down the precipitous streets to the Duomo of S. 
Rufino, whose facade is a vision of beauty, and at whose font 
St. Francis and the Emperor Frederick the Second were 
baptized, and down again to the church of S. Chiara, whose 
crypt holds the still uncorrupt body of St. Clare and the 
crucifix which spoke to St. Francis at S. Damiano, it is 
difficult to believe that we are not in a city of the earlier 
years, everything is so quiet, so unhurried — it is easy to for- 
get the hurly-burly of the thirteenth century. 

It is on the way past S. Chiara, leaving the town, by the 
Porta Nuova, that you go to the little church of S. Damiano, 
which owes its very being to St. Francis. In the garden of 
the convent, to which no woman" may go, many a pleasant 
hour of the spring days slips by almost unheeded — so quietly, 



44 THE CITIES OF UMBEIA 

so sweetly do they pass among the flowers, and the thoughts 
that come to you from long ago fragrant with the innocence 
of the little nuns. The frescoes here, as at S. Chiara, are 
of the school of Giotto, by Tiberio d'Assisi, or another. 
Almost as plentiful as the flowers, we pass them by with 
the same silent acceptance- as just the delightful gifts of 
Nature, which indeed they are, painted for love in a land of 
sunshine. 

The way to the Hermitage of the Carceri is rough and 
long, but I am not sure that a sight of this lovely refuge 
from the world is not the best way for the traveller to 
realise the life of the monks and friars of the thirteenth 
century. A little more than one hour, if you walk, from 
Assisi, on the slopes of Subasio, the little convent in the 
woods seems to be surrounded by silence as by a rampart. 
Save to the pilgrim, however, the relics preserved there are 
of little interest ; the pillow and the hair shirt, pitiful enough 
to-day, they too, like all relics, long ago should have obtained 
the satisfaction of oblivion. The tiny chapels in their sim- 
plicity, founded as they are on the bare rock, bring back to 
us perhaps, as nothing else can, the humility of the great 
saint. Even to pass through the doors it is necessary to 
stoop, and one is but divided from Nature by the greater 
silence. Just outside is the forest, a wooded cleft in the 
hillside, cool and dark, and full of a kind of mystery. One 
comes back to Assisi after a day on that mighty hillside as 
to a new world. Its warmth, its colour, its fantastic beauty 
seem more friendly, more homely than before. San Fran- 
cesco is less dark, and all the people of the city have friendly 
faces, for outside in the woods and the forests, on the hills 
and in the cold tiny corridors of that strange refuge our own 
souls confronted us with beseeching eyes, begging perhaps 
for a new tyranny, a new love, and the years devoured us ; 
and we, how should we satisfy them 1 



Ill 

SPELLO 

SPELLO is so near to Assisi, and the way thither is so 
pleasant, that all save those who are desperate with 
hurry should walk or drive thither from the city of St. Francis. 
There is but little to be seen : a few Roman remains, an amphi- 
theatre, a triumphal arch in ruin, a gateway. Porta Veneris, 
over which lean the heads of two men and a woman ; and, 
save for a sculpture here and there, that is all that is left of 
the Roman Hispellum. It was not, however, to find Roman 
things that I came to Spello on her little hill, but to see 
the work of the great and exquisite sentimentalist, Pin- 
toricchio. Nowhere save in Siena can you see him so well 
as in this small clambering city, where in 1501 — the year in 
which Perugino was painting in the Cambio — he was busy 
with his dainty superficial dreams in the Duomo, S. Maria 
Maggiore. A painter who delighted in beauty, you might be 
tempted to say as you look on his charming and exquisite 
work to-day in the Baglioni Chapel there, in the Duomo. 
Nor, after all, would you be wrong. Beauty, conceived as he 
conceived it, was his conscious aim. I do not know in all 
his work a woman who is not surpassing pretty. He pleases 
us by the lightness of his touch, the daintiness of his perfect 
handling, the nicety of his finish. Almost a painter of genre, 
but of a cheerfulness never found in the North, he is so 
much greater in the Sistine Chapel than anywhere else that 
we are always startled to find so much promise, after all, 

45 



46 THE CITIES OF UMBKIA 

merely talent. He seems to have been so susceptible to 
influence that in the company of great men he becomes 
almost one of them, just as when left to himself, or with the 
subtle and scornful Perugino, he becomes — well, just a painter 
of 'out of doors,' a great space composer, as Mr. Berenson 
has said, so much less great than his master. 

The Duomo in its small piazza is not a very interests 
ing building. The western fa9ade is simple, and some 
Romanesque designs of animals and vines and flowers, 
together with reliefs, are on the doorway. In a simple and 
more country fashion they suggest the great Romanesque 
bestiaries at Spoleto. In the Cappella del Sacramento, how- 
ever, we find the frescoes we have come to see : on the left 
the Annunciation, in front of us the Nativity, and on the 
right Christ among the Doctors. The best of these is, to my 
mind, the Annunciation. For once Pintoricchio seems to 
have been possessed, really captured, by the beauty of the 
vision of Mary. She, that beautiful maid who has become 
the loveliest of all our loves, winnowed by the dreams of 
men, persuaded by their prayers, wearied but still listening 
to our devotion, is still in the dawn of her simplicity, reading 
some simple and entrancing book, when suddenly, before she 
can turn the page, God has sent His messenger, a kind of 
splendid knight, to tell her of her destiny. So it is in the 
midst of her day-dreams that she is interrupted, and having 
overheard, as it were, the love of the Rose of Sharon, is 
suddenly confronted with Love himself, whose Mother, in a 
less happy way than in the old Greek world, but with a 
new tenderness and refinement, she, a white maid, scarcely 
wakened to life as yet, is to be. There is nothing here of 
the profound melancholy of Botticelli, whose Madonnas 
looked, it might seem, for some more human affection, nor 
of the profound and subtle joy of Lionardo's Virgins. Here 
is the story as it has been told to us in our childhood, not 



'^?aC«*>iW?W*s'*^ »^*~^ — -''^->\-^5 \»~N-^-w ^J^^J^.-J^^ 




PORTA VENERIS, SPELLO 



SPELLO 47 

actually as it came to us then, but as we remember it now 
when we are old, seizing the superficial beauty of all that, 
and unable to comprehend its sheer loveliness and perfection 
since it has become too simple for us. In the Nativity 
Pintoricchio is less fine, is indeed what we have come to 
regard him — a mere pupil of Perugino, without that master's 
magical spaciousness and splendour of proportion. It is the 
same with the Christ among the Doctors, and yet the picture 
strikes one with a kind of though tfulness. This man might 
surely have been a great painter had he been brought up in 
the thoughtful Florentine tradition. He is without strength : 
Umbria with her light and space and gentle landscapes, soft 
hills and sweet plains full of sunshine, was too enervating for a 
personality susceptible to every influence,, so sensitive was it. 
In contact with Rome he achieved a kind of greatness, in 
contact with the valley of St. Francis and mystical Italy he 
attained only to a reticent sentimentality; understanding 
the achievement of Perugino, and yet unable to express him- 
self through the same medium of perfect spaciousness and 
light, he gave away his heart to the beauty of some girl who 
haunts all his pictures. Her hair is gathered across her ears 
and falls behind her, her forehead is beautiful and delicate, 
she has dove's eyes, and her ears are a little pointed. Her 
body is a lily of the field, and her hands are small and veined, 
and softer than the tendrils of the vine. At first we turn 
away our eyes from her lest we should love her as he did, 
but little by little we weary of her, for she looks forth on 
the morning fair as the moon, and her light and loveliness 
' are borrowed. Little by little we see that she is not beauti- 
ful ; it is the sun or the sky or the air that have given her 
something that she herself will never possess. Surrounded 
by these, inspired by their splendour, we suffer her, though 
we be wearied with her pretty beauty, and soon we are able 
to forget her altogether in the delight of another and 



48 THE CITIES OF UMBEIA 

infinitely greater master who led her away and transformed 
her with his genius and love, and from many a canvas she 
looks at us, an immortal soul shining in her eyes. 

One wanders to the Gothic church of S. Andrea, where 
is a large altar-piece by Pintoricchio of Madonna and Saints, 
painted in 1508; the same, qualities meet us in this work, 
only a little more superficial in its exquisite pictorial pretti- 
ness, as in the frescoes in the Duomo. And then if one has 
time, it is delightful to walk to S. Girolamo under the 
olives, where it is so cool in the glittering shade, and look 
down the valley of Spoleto, that ever since we left Perugia 
has been opening before us. It was here, as I sat reading 
on a May afternoon, that I saw a poor man sowing his seed 
in his tiny field, broadcast, with a primitive- and splendid 
gesture, as in the early world. And having made an end 
of his work, in a corner of the field he knelt and prayed to 
God. Thus in old Umbria they scatter their seed and their 
prayers, and are sure of a miracle. It was for such a cause 
that St. Francis lived and made his Canticle of the Sun ; and 
St. Angela heard Christ speak by the wayside ■, and Blessed 
Columba wandered in sadness through many cities. And I, 
who go up and down over the world thinking of pictures and 
the little difference 'twixt this and this, what am I beside 
such a man as that ? Has it made glad my heart, that nothing 
Can happen or stir in the fields without God's approbation 1 
Have I understood that God is my friend who holds all 
chances, all awakening, and the being of all things, fast in His 
hands ? Have I begged nothing of man before first remind- 
ing myself of God % Ah, but my peasant had understood the 
simplicity of life as I have never done, for he is one with the 
absolute things of Nature. The corn which he sowed he 
knows lived and died, and, if God will, shall live again, grow 
and be green, washed with the rain, swept by the wind, 
dried with the sun, and golden in the summer heat. In the 



SPELLO 49 

cool nights under the stars it is watched over by some 
divinity ; then reaped with labour and joy, and all for 
him a sinner. Happy in his fields, how shall I attain to his 
simplicity in the noisy and trumpery cities where I shall not 
see the sky 1 



D 



ly 

FOLIGNO AND MONTEFALCO 

TjlOLIGNO, in the broad valley of Spoleto, is known to the 
-^ world as the city of the Blessed Angela, or as the 
town of a few towers that hovers in the background of 
Raphael's picture, Madonna di Foligno. A busy enough 
place on a market-day, seeing that to-day as ever it is the 
meeting-place of the roads from Arezzo, Perugia, and the 
north, and from Ancona and the Adriatic, for Rome, it has 
not changed much, since the beginning of the sixteenth 
century when Raphael put it into his picture. The inns 
are somewhat poor, and the place itself of no great interest 
to the traveller, save that in its primitive prosperity it is 
perhaps alive, while Spello or Assisi are dead or dying, 
concerned only with things long ago. But Foligno is of a 
certain commercial importance and a military station. It is 
not, however, these things that will bring the traveller here 
on his way from Assisi to Spoleto, but perhaps a desire to 
see the church where Blessed Angela heard the preacher 
and confessed her sins, or it may be the strange frescoes of 
Ottaviano Nelli and Niccol6 da Foligno, who was born here. 
Going from the Piazza della Fiera into the Via Cavour, 
where on the right one passes the inn, the Albergo della 
Posta, a rather delightful hostelry, in no great while one 
comes to the Piazza Yittorio Emanuele, for Foligno is nothing 
if not modern. On the far side of this Piazza rises the 
Palazzo Trinci, the dwelling-place of a race which Symonds 

60 



FOLIGNO AND MONTEFALCO 51 

tells us was subject to the usual vicissitudes that dogged the 
steps of the great families of mediaeval Italy. ' All that can 
be affirmed with accuracy,' he writes, 'is that in the Middle 
Ages, while Spello and Bevagna declined into the inferiority 
of dependent burghs, Foligno grew in power and became the 
chief commune of this part of Umbria. It was famous, during 
the last centuries of struggle between the Italian burghers 
and their native despots, for its peculiar ferocity in civil 
strife. Some of the bloodiest pages in mediaeval Italian 
history are those which relate the vicissitudes of the Trinci 
family, the exhaustion of Foligno by internal discord, and its 
final submission to the Papal power.' The Trinci family, it 
would seem, was practically ruler of Foligno during the whole 
of the fourteenth century, and until in the early part of the 
fifteenth century the Pope expelled the house. Siding with the 
Church as" they did in the struggle of Guelph and Ghibelline, 
it seems that they always had their power from the Pope, so 
that when in 1439 they quarrelled with Eugenius i v. they 
fell never to rise again. It was, however, in 1424 that they 
employed Ottaviano Nelli of Gubbio to paint their chapel for 
them, attaining thereby an immortality, at least among us 
travellers, that none of their other deeds would have given 
them. The chapel is built on the upper floor of the palace, 
and is painted in fresco with the History of the Blessed 
Virgin. On the roof Ottaviano has told the story in brief 
of St. Joachim and St. Anne, the mother and father of Mary. 
For, as it happened, they loved one another and were 
wedded, but they had no child. For this cause they made 
'their oiferings in the Temple, and, being childless, they were 
suspected of some evil and turned adrift from the Temple 
where they served. St. Joachim in his wretchedness went into 
the desert, and there, after many years, an angel found him 
and told him to go to the Golden Gate of the Temple, nothing 
doubting, to meet St. Anne ; and in truth it all happened as 



52 THE CITIES OF UMBRIA 

the angel said, and soon a child was born to them, the Blessed 
Virgin herself — Rosa Mystica, Lilium Convallium. Soon 
Mary herself is presented in the Temple, and marries Joseph, 
whose rod alone among those many others blossomed, and 
she too hears the message of the angel and Christ is born, and 
the great Kings come froni the East to worship Him. He 
is crucified and ascends into heaven. The Apostles, as was 
most fitting, come to the Blessed Virgin before they go into 
all the world, as the Prince of Life had said. Suddenly they 
are recalled and see that most sweet Rose droop a little, 
and pass into the heaven of her Son. 

Thus Ottaviano Nelli has painted almost the history of 
the birth of Christianity on these walls, where in the spring 
sunshine his work still tells us of one of the most curious 
souls in all Italy. Nor is he concerned only with that early 
age, for as though to suggest something of the years that 
were even then passing, he has painted St. John Baptist, St. 
Antony, St. Dominic, and St. Francis, certainly four of the 
greatest names even yet in Christian history. There is 
little, if any, aesthetic delight in these rude paintings, but 
as I think a very strange revelation of a soul as ecstatic as 
that of Jacopo da Todi. Here is a man who is simply outside 
the history of art. He does not partake of its progress; is, 
indeed, utterly indifferent to it. But on some day of sun- 
shine after rain he has dreamed a dream or heard a voice or 
seen a vision, as St. Francis did, as Blessed Angela did, as 
St. Catherine did, and henceforth he is, as it were, indifferent 
to the world, intent as he must ever be on the sweet and 
strange experience that met him by the way. He is not 
in love with beauty at all, but is anxious to tell us his 
own dream, which was not so gentle a thing as those visions 
of Fra Angelico, whose contemporary he was, but something 
ruder, stronger, perhaps, and certainly less initiated, less of 
a compromise with the beauty of the world. ' A marsh 



FOLIGNO AND MONTEFALCO 53 

growth/ Mr. Berenson has said, and indeed strange and 
wonderful things come from a marsh. But it is, I think, as 
the brother of God's fool that I at any rate have come to 
think of him, uncouth as he is, without an elementary sense 
of beauty, save that he had noted tHe colour on the hills, 
perhaps, and found a kind of satisfaction in it; a painter 
possessed, one who has seen a vision, and is dumb therefor ; 
but for him the great thing was to have seen that vision, 
and for us that he has tried to tell us of it. 

The Cathedral of S. Feliciano, on the eastern side of the 
Piazza, is an entirely modernised building. S. Feliciano, to 
whom it is dedicated, was a bishop, it is said, of this city in 
the third century. But it is not for him that we come to it 
to-day, without fresco, or painting, or sculpture as it is ; a 
modern church, full of the horrible modern decorations that 
deface the churches of the Catholic Faith all over the world. 
It is for Blessed Angela's sake we come and meditate for a 
moment amid all that modernity. For was it not on the 
morning after her prayer to St. Francis for guidance, that 
' she found a friar, a true chaplain of Christ, preaching 
in the Church of S. Feliciano, to whom she made a full con- 
fession in bitterness, shame, and grief ; receiving, still with 
those after sobs shaking her like a weary child, his absolu- 
tion.' It was from this point that Blessed Angela set out upon 
her slow and wonderful journey towards purification, and 
was for many years ' full of grief and without consolation.' 
And it is of her we think as we pass to the old desecrated 
Church of the Annunziata, where is a ruined work of 
'Perugino — the Baptism of Christ. To get to it we must pass 
through the shop of a carpenter, which, to the traveller who 
is something of a symbolist, will surely not be displeasing. 

But it is perhaps in the Church of S. Niccol6, where Niccolo 
da Foligno, the pupil of Benozzo Gozzoli of Florence, has 
painted his magnificent altar-piece, that you will find your 



54: THE CITIES OF UMBRIA 

real excuse for having come to so strange a place as Foligno 
at all. Of Niccold I speak elsewhere, but something may, 
perhaps, be said of this immense altar-piece in which he 
expresses himself so eagerly. In the central panel the 
Blessed Virgin and St. Joseph adore the Bambino. The 
figure of Mary, so strong and beautiful, seems to me to be 
Niccolo's best piece of work ; behind, not far away, the 
shepherds, impatient to see that Saviour who is Christ the 
Lord, run towards Bethlehem ; far and far away the three 
kings journey through a strange landscape to find the place 
where the Child lay. Above, Niccol6 has painted, not with- 
out a real strength, the Resurrection, while at the sides are St. 
John Baptist, St. Nicholas, and St. Sebastian, with two others, 
and St. Nicholas of Tolentino, St. Jerome, St." John Evan- 
gelist, and St. Michael, with two others. The poor Coronation, 
in a side-chapel, is unworthy of this impassioned painter, but 
the triptych is, I think, his masterpiece, and worthy of patient 
study. 

From S. Niccol6 we pass again down the Via della Scuola, 
and turning to the right find the Piazza Giordano Bruno 
(did I not say well when I said Foligno was nothing if not 
modern 1), wherein are the two churches, S. Domenico and 
S. Maria infra Portas. The latter is a very ancient build- 
ing, containing many antique frescoes utterly ruined. Many 
curious legends surround it with a kind of fascination which 
attracts one as much as the obvious beauty of the place. 
Once, so we are told, it was a temple of Diana ; and then 
again, that St. Peter celebrated Mass there in the little 
chapel on the right. However this may be, it is worthy of a 
visit chiefly because of its picturesque doorway, I suppose ; 
though, indeed, I found the church itself delightful. 

So the traveller passes through Foligno, for the most part 
without enthusiasm ; and yet for me, I protest, it holds 
memories of summer days, when in the heat and dust I have 



FOLIGNO AND MONTEFALCO 55 

found her churches cool, and her pictures at least free from 
the trail of the tourist and the vulgarity that the camera has 
thrust upon so many masterpieces. Moreover, when it is 
too hot in the valley one may go to Montefalco so easily, 
and find there coolness and silence. The road to Montefalco 
is beautiful with views of the ever-changing valley and the 
mountains ; and the little city herself, high on her hill, is 
like a flaming torch thrust into the sky at noon. Her 
unfrequented streets seem still to shine with the beautiful 
footsteps of the saints ; her aspect is that of some mystical 
hermit whose face is flushed with some marvellous sweet 
thought of God, whose eyes search heaven for His advent. 
Only a lesser witness than Assisi to the great Saint of 
Umbria, she seems to look across the wide valley to Assisi 
as a daughter towards her mother. It is not Giotto who has 
clothed her with his own inexpressible glory while telling 
the legend of St. Francis, but Benozzo Gozzoli, the pupil of 
Fra Angelico, who with his simple realism and delightful 
sense of the loveliness of such natural things as flowers and 
animals, has painted her the same immortal story — not in 
vain, for his influence is found again and again in such men 
as Bonfigli, Niccol6 da Foligno, whose work one has learned 
to care for in Foligno, and in Fiorenzo di Lorenzo. Nor, as 
it seems to me, did Pintoricchio wholly escape his charm ; 
much of his delight in those natural beauties which crowd 
his pictures is, it may well be, owing to the work of this 
Tuscan painter. It is in the little Church of S. Francesco — 
desecrated now and used as a picture-gallery — in what was 
once the choir, that we find the frescoes of the life of 
St. Francis, painted in the middle of the fifteenth century 
by Benozzo Gozzoli. It is here for the first time almost we 
come upon that growth, that progress towards some half- 
apprehended ideal, which every legend seems to possess. 
St. Francis was a man so like to Christ as almost to be 



56 THE CITIES OF UMBEIA 

mistaken for Him ; it is therefore certain that he too, like to 
the Prince of Life, was born in a stable. And even as old 
Simeon and Anna had prophesied of Christ, so a pilgrim tells 
of St. Francis, and a poor man spreads his coat for the saint 
to tread on. Thus gradually in the minds of men St. 
Francis became, even in lesser things, a kind of imitation of 
Jesus of Nazareth. The first words of the Fioretti are a 
proof of this, for it is there written that ' At first, needs 
must we consider how the glorious Saint Francis in all the 
acts of his life was conformed unto Christ the Blessed One : 
how even as Christ in the beginning of His preaching chose 
twelve Apostles to contemn all earthly things, to follow Him 
in poverty and other virtues, so St. Francis in the beginning 
chose out for the founding of the Order twelve companions, 
possessors of the deepest poverty.' Thus in the very begin- 
ning of the legend we see how men's minds were impressed 
by the strange and beautiful likeness of the Poverello to the 
Saviour of the World. It is only strange to us of a material, 
unimaginative age, that those who loved him should have 
assured themselves of the fact that he too was born in a 
stable, and was recognised by the old who had seen visions. 
The frescoes continue the life of the saint almost as in the 
upper church at Assisi, where the work of Giotto was doubt- 
less known to Benozzo Gozzoli. They are particularly inter- 
esting as the early work of a man who, brought by Fra 
Angelico to Rome and Orvieto — where, as here, his work is 
really an imitation of his master — was later to develop a very 
lovely kind of originality, as in the frescoes in the Riccardi 
Chapel, or at S. Gimignano, or in his masterpieces at Pisa, 
where he painted from 1469 to 1487. Here in Montefalco 
he is the pupil of Fra Angelico, and almost nothing else. But 
in that humility, the attitude of the scholar to one who was 
so worthy of his allegiance, it may well be, we find his work 
really greater than when he had, as it were, forsaken his 



FOLIGNO AND MONTEFALCO 57 

dreams of Christ for the beauty of the world. Of far more 
importance, it seems to me, in Umbrian than in Florentine art 
— where he is really a mediocrity — he was, in Central Italy 
certainly, the means of awakening much thought and energy 
in painting. It was Mr. Ruskin who" called Ghirlandajo a 
goldsmith, and the same accusation might with even more 
justice be brought against Benozzo Gozzoli. Born near to 
Florence in 1420, he was, as indeed were other artists, 
apprenticed to some metal-worker, and even helped Ghiberti 
to forge the gates of Paradise. In his early work, however, 
under the influence of Angelico, he, having had a glimpse of 
heaven, turning to the earth found it every whit as fair. And 
it is at this moment, I think, while still under the spell of 
the Frate that he is valuable to us, rather than in his far 
more popular frescoes in the Riccardi Chapel. He tells the 
story of .St. Francis here in Montefalco like a romance 
almost, in which the spirit of adventure, the call of the road, 
the magical persistence of to-morrow blend very happily with 
the lovely life of the little poor man. Looking on these 
frescoes, how tawdry seems the splendour of the journey of 
the three kings in Florence, how superficial the gorgeous 
works at Pisa ! Here his work is so uninitiated, so boyish, 
as it were, as almost to disarm criticism, and in that very 
freshness, without ulterior ideas about art, he comes nearer 
by a very great way than Giotto to realising for us the 
spiritual beauty of St. Francis's life. Certainly for me he 
realises that spiritual beauty, and strives to make us realise 
it as no other painter of the Franciscan legend whose work 
I have seen ; and so, though for no other cause yet for this, 
Montefalco is worth the trouble of a visit. There is more of 
his work, sadly ruined now, in the chapels of the north aisle, 
of which the angels still contain something of their former 
beauty, and tell us not a little . of his pupil Bonfigli. 
Perugino has left us a remembrance of his genius close to the 



58 THE CITIES OF UMBRIA 

west door — a lovely fresco of the Adoration of the Shepherds, 
whose landscape, with that wide Umbrian sky so full of 
light and space, tells us more of Italia Mystica than any 
picture I remember. For with Perugino there is at least 
this much saved from the wreck of time — to wit, his marvel- 
lous apprehension of space, of serene light, and the spiritual 
effect of just that. It is as though he had contrived to seize 
the poetry of a clear, serene sky and ample landscape, and to 
place in that apprehension all his treasure, so that in spite 
of his sentimentality and insincerity and scornfulness he is a 
great spiritual poet, composing out of just light and space 
wonderful dreams. 

There are remains of frescoes by Benozzo Gozzoli in the 
monastic church of S. Fortunato, outside the' city on the 
road to Spoleto, that terrible road on which the sun is so 
pitiless, but they are scarcely worth a visit ; and yet that quiet 
master Tiberio d'Assisi has painted there with all his charm- 
ing serenity the story of St. Francis and the roses ; and, 
indeed, the chapel where his frescoes dwell is the Chapel of 
the Rosary, a cool and lovely place in which to think of all 
the departed beauty of life and of the world. Shall we ever 
again, as in old days, love beauty and simple ways as they 
used to here in Italy, as we did ourselves long and long ago ? 
I know not ; but in England, so far away over the sea and 
the mountains, I am sure they dream very different dreams 
from these so delicately suggested to us in this cool church. 
There St. Francis is either a legend without any reality, a 
piece of exquisite but antiquated poetry, or a kind of rebel ; 
while for us in Italy is he not alive 1 shall we not meet him, it 
may be, on the way, or in the hottest part of the road, or 
praying in the woods or the hills, or succouring some 
desperate poor man in the city ? Is he really gone for ever, 
he of whom we were so sure — as Christ went, as all the 
saints have gone — leaving us so alone, never to return 1 It 



FOLiaNO AND MONTEFALCO 59 

may well be ; and as one looks on his desecrated church and 
dismantled convents, how can we dream it otherwise 1 And 
yet, and yet, I am sure I shall see him, though not now ; I 
shall find him, though not here, the stars he looked on, are 
they not mine 1 and the mountains that he loved I love too. 
In the byways I still hear him singing those French songs 
that he loved ; and Poverty is she less fair, or Obedience less 
to be desired, or Chastity so common, that every man has 
possessed her since the days when he went barefoot 1 Ah, 
no ! As the sunset touches the hills at last, he will come back 
to us, and love us, and be good to us as of old. Be sure, 
though all men die, he is not dead. Though our dearest are 
forgotten like spilt mne, and we labour in that earth which 
is laden with our dead, we cannot watch the birds, or see 
bright fire, or hear the faint notes of a song across the valley, 
or hope for the spreading roses, or think of love, or care for 
the soft earth, or the tender sky, or the sound of waters 
without remembering him ; for he was part of all these 
things, joyfully feeling their secret life that we feel too, but 
seeing something beside in all the immortal beauty that we 
have forgotten, of which he will return to remind us. 



TREVI AND THE TEMPLE OF CLITUMNUS 

THE way from Foligno to Trevi takes us at once almost 
into Virgil's country, the valley of the Clitumnus. If 
the night is spent at Montefalco — not so daring an adventure 
as it seems — you may drive to Trevi by a way as pleasant 
as any in the world, following the river as it flows, 
and crossing both river and railway to climb up to Trevi. 
But the way by S. Martino is beautiful exceedingly, and 
the torrents after the rain only add to the charm of the road. 
All travellers have wondered at Trevi since she perched her- 
self on the top of her precipitous hill, and though few of 
them visited her on her lonely height, she impressed her 
memory upon them even from a distance. 'I am so very 
tired and sleepy,' writes one of the most charming travellers 
that ever followed where the road led — to wit, Nathaniel 
Hawthorne — ' I am so very tired and sleepy that I mean to 
mention nothing else to-night [did he not keep one of the 
most delightful note-books in the world 1] except the city of 
Trevi, which, on the approach from Spoleto, seems so com- 
pletely to cover a high-peaked hill from its pyramidal tip to 
its base. It was the strangest situation in which to build a 
town, where I suppose no horse can climb, and whence no 
inhabitant would think of descending into the world after 
the approach of age should begin to stiffen his joints. 
Looking back on this most picturesque of towns (which the 
road, of course, did not enter, as evidently no road could) 1 

60 




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TREVI AND THE TEMPLE OF CLITUMNUS 61 

saw that the highest part of the hill was quite covered with 
a crown of edifices, terminating in a church tower ; while a 
part of the northern side was apparently too steep for 
building, and a cataract of houses flowed down the western 
and southern slopes. There seemed to be palaces, churches, 
everything that a city should have ; but my eyes are heavy 
and I can write no more about them, only that I suppose the 
summit of the hill was artificially tenured, so as to prevent 
its crumbling down, and to enable it to support the platform 
of edifices which crowns it.' 

We may perhaps remember for our comfort that Hawthorne 
was ' so very tired and sleepy,' since he uses so hateful, so vile 
a word as ' edifice ' twice in a short passage. Well, I was tired 
too when I came to Trevi at sunset, and the inn was poor 
even for an Umbrian albergo. But I was tired, and forgot 
the poverty of my room in the relief of being able to sleep ; 
and indeed the bed was soft and clean, things common in 
Italy even in the poorest places. 

There is nothing but a fine Perugino and the strange 
situation of the place itself to bring one to Trevi. Half-way 
down the hill, in the church of La Madonna delle Lagrime, 
is a magnificent picture, the Adoration of the Magi, set in a 
beautiful landscape, which it is said Perugino painted when 
he was seventy-five years old. Having seen this, there is 
really nothing else to keep you. A few poor pictures by Lo 
Spagna, a Madonna by Tiberio d'Assisi, and nothing more. 
But in one of the Lo Spagnas, the Entombment in La 
Madonna delle Lagrime, we see a copy of Raphael's picture 
in Rome very much in the same manner as Mr. Berenson 
has taught us to see a copy of Raphael's Sposalizio in the 
picture at Caen. It will perhaps interest the traveller to 
consider this. 

But this is Virgil's country, and it is surely of him we 
should think when we first set foot in it. Could it have been 



62 THE CITIES OF UMBRIA 

of any other city, think you, that he sang, than Trebia of old, 
when in the second Georgic he writes — 

' Adde tot egregias urbes, operumque laborem, 
Tot congesta manu praeruptis oppida saxis, 
Fluminaque antiques subterlabentia muros/ 

Ah, those rivers flowing beneath ancient walls ! Was not 
one of them the Clitumnus ? For see, only a little earlier he 
names her — 

' Haec loca non tauri spirantes naribus ignem 
Invertere satis inmanis dentibus hydri ; 
Nee galeis densisque virum seges horruit hastis : 
Sed gravidae fruges et Bacchi Massicus humor 
Implevere ; tenent oleae armentaque laeta. • 
Hinc bellator equus campo sese arduus infert ; 
Hinc albi, Clitumne, greges, et maxima taurus 
Victima, saepe tuo perfusi flumine sacro, 
Eomanos ad templa deum duxere triumphos.' 

The white, the snowy flocks of Clitumnus, where are they 
now ? And the bull that bathed in the sacred stream before 
it was led the chiefest victim to the temples of the gods, the 
triumphs of Rome ; and these temples, are they quite gone 
from our world ? Let us see. 

As you set out for Spoleto, if you are wise enough to go 
by road — it is but twelve miles — when you have passed a 
third of the way you come to a tiny temple high over the 
stream, which here among the trees and the grass has its source. 
And it is the temple of the river god that you look on, in all 
its little splendour of silence and ruin. At least, I hope it is ; 
but some speak of a Christian building and will not listen to 
Pliny. But however that may be, it is a place too beautiful 
for any to pass by. I confess that, following the advice of the 
younger Pliny, I bathed there, and found, as he had said, 
the water as cold as snow. But in vain, in vain, I looked for 
the god Clitumnus and could not find him, though Pliny said 



TREVI AND THE TEMPLE OF CLITUMNUS 63 

that he was there, 'not naked but adorned with the toga.' 
And then in the shade, within sound of the beautiful river, I 
read again in Virgil. Is it not thus one might desire to 
spend endless days ? But for us travellers who go on foot 
the sun is ever something of a god ; imperious as he is he 
commands our days. He was slanting down the sky, remind- 
ing me that Spoleto was still far and I alone, and night 
would follow him. So I set out at last with regret; and 
later I came to S. Giacomo in Poseta, where I saw again 
some Lo Spagnas, but I liked them not, for I was thinking 
of the temple over the source of the beautiful river and the 
god I had not seen. As night fell I came to the gates of 
Spoleto. 



VI 

SPOLETO 

SPOLETO is a beautiful city of rose colour set on a high 
hill. Her silent, maze-like streets assured me at least 
of a primitive inn fully sufficient for a poor man, and of an 
almost entire absence of that mighty army of martyrs who 
are led about Italy by Baedeker. I came to her in an evil 
mood, hating my fellow-men, and especially the tourist, as I 
have said ; I left her after a long time refreshed and rested, 
at peace with all men, having understood her beauty and her 
joy, and indeed it is in a kind of sudden and overwhelming 
joy that her towers pierce far up into the sky— those rosy 
towers that at dawn and midday and sunset are musical with 
soft bells, and that fade away into the night from rose colour 
to violet and deep purple under a sky of innunierable stars. 
Behind her rise higher and higher forests of primaeval ilex, 
the sacred tree of the Latin race, shrouding her^ as it were, 
in a mantle most rare of darkest green. Over her head, far 
away above the forests, a Franciscan convent soars like a 
brown bird floating on the wind, whose bells are not heard, 
but only seen to ring, or heard only in the most fortunate 
days when their sound is little more than the piping of those 
crested larks that sang St. Francis up to heaven. Joy, 
joyousness — it is the very mood of the city whose valleys 
are so soft and sweet. It was in one of these valleys, 
luminous beyond our northern dreams, that S. Angela of 
Foligno heard these breathless words of Christ : ' I love thee 

64 



SPOLETO 65 

more than any woman in the valley of Spoleto.' So in the 
vineyards and the valleys of Umbria, of old, men and women 
talked with God, and indeed the whole land, even to the 
most superficial observer, seems blessed. Climb up to the 
great Roman aqueduct that spans the profound ravine 
which isolates Spoleto on her round hill, and at evening look 
across the valleys to the hills and the mountains ; that 
luminous softness, a delicacy so magical that you had 
thought only the genius of Raphael or Perugino could 
imagine and express it, is just reality. With light, with 
fragile glory, with the wide and tender glance of the sky, 
every delicate form of hill and cloud and mountain is em- 
braced. The hills are round and softer than the clouds 
almost. It is a landscape that is profoundly feminine in 
form, that has the very aspect of a young and exquisite 
woman moulded by God out of the earth He made. And it 
is amidst these perfect hills that Spoleto sings for joy. 

Yet she too, like to Perugia and Assisi and all the cities 
of Umbria, has her terrible aspect. She too in her day has 
poured forth insolent armies, and, grimly crouched beneath 
her Fortezza, awaited the signal, holding her heart for fear. 
Even now in days of still sunshine — days so mysterious in 
Italy, that produced, doubtless, something of the mysticism of 
her countless saints — La Rocca, her fortress, holds still all the 
terror of the Middle Age, all the fierce and cruel joy of the 
Renaissance, that saw the streets of these cities, now so quiet, 
run with blood, that looked for sudden and fierce encounters 
at the street-corner in the sunshine or the moonlight, at the 
same time as it produced the soft work of Perugino and 
the curiously impersonal and dry paintings of Pietro dei 
Franceschi. Still La Rocca watches for the foe, and does she 
not see him advancing surely down the valley of the Tiber 1 
Already he occupies Perugia and Assisi, soon perhaps she 
too will be in his grip. For Modernity will make but little 
E 



66 THE CITIES OF UMBEIA 

of ridding her of her precious possessions, her maze-like 
ways, her dreams, her quiet, and above all, her joy. 

On first coming to her it is to the cathedral we climb, 
breathlessly, for her ways are steep and ruinous, to see the 
frescoes of one of the most delightful of the Florentine 
painters, Filippo Lippi. They are his masterpiece, and tell 
the story in brief of the Virgin Mary in her own cathedral, 
S. Maria Assunta. The chief fresco is that of the Corona- 
tion of the Virgin. Pale from the encounter with Death, in 
which but a moment ago she has proved victorious, tall and 
slight, Regina Angelorum is crowned, not by Christ her Son, 
but by G-od the Father, in a heaven delicate as the petals of 
the flags in the valleys full of corn, powdered with stars that 
seem to have risen just over the sea. The sun and the 
moon beneath her feet are lesser glories where she is. About 
her a company of angels sings and dances for joy since 
heaven is by so much richer than our earth. A few with a 
shy and timid grace, magically charming, hand her a few 
flowers from the highways or the woods of heaven, as though 
to ask her if they might be sweeter than the lilies she loved 
as a girl, or the wild flowers of Palestine. The rest of the 
frescoes — the Annunciation, in which she stands so surprised, 
so agitated, that she twists her fingers together and is not 
sure what to answer; the Nativity, a magnificent fresco, 
now but a shadow ; and the Death of the Virgin, where Christ 
Himself with a tenderness, but with a tenderness and love, 
carries His Mother to heaven — are much over-painted, and by 
a lesser hand. And yet we catch some shadow of Filippo in 
them all, so that even in their ruin they are not the least 
among the precious things at Spoleto. In a quiet and sunny 
chapel of the great church, the dust of Filippo Lippi, that 
vagabond and joyous mortal, was laid by the jealous people 
of Spoleto in 1489. Lorenzo de' Medici, who seems to have 
loved him, tried in vain to secure his ashes so that they 



SPOLETO 67 

might lie in Florence. But Spoleto, proud and poor with 
but little that was very precious in her possession, would not 
have it so. You are rich and we are poor, she seems to have 
said ; excuse us then if we keep the'bones of this one great 
man, which you can well afford to leave in our keeping. 
Lorenzo would seem to have consented, perhaps a little re- 
luctantly, contenting himself with building a noble tomb for 
the painter in S. Maria Assunta, and with composing a long 
Latin inscription. 

The strangely adventurous life that came to an end here 
in Spoleto is very typical of certain aspects of the Eenais- 
sance : its 'profound passion for liberty, its experiment in 
romance and sentiment, its desire above everything for 
passion. And it is curious and not insignificant that it is not 
in the exciting and creative earth of Tuscany that Filippo 
Lippi, the fatal and erring son of the greatest of modern 
cities, is laid to rest, but among the quiet and blessed hills of 
Umbria, that mystical land that produced no great intelli- 
gence, only a spirit that to how large an extent has influenced 
the world. 

It is, however, a mood the very opposite to this that over- 
whelms us in the Chiesa del Crocefisso, which has been built 
from the ruins of a Eoman temple. To-day its facade 
guards the Campo Santo with its hard white crosses and 
beady flowers, and all the frippery of modern death. Mag- 
nificent pillars, Eoman and Pagan, group themselves round 
the choir and chancel ; and the nave is ennobled by the 
remains of the shafts, now ruinous, that once bore the 
weight of some splendid roof. Pagan prayers to Pagan gods, 
not dead but living in exile, perhaps in the ilex woods that 
crown the city and seem from here to envelope her in their 
sombre mantle, creep piteously into the warm sunshine that 
floods the church from the open door. They seem to knock 
at our hearts ; and gazing at the feeble and terrible ' decora- 



68 THE CITIES OF UMBRIA 

tions ' of the Christian altar loaded with hard and crude 
artificial flowers, and candlesticks covered with silver paper, 
the dirty hangings, the impotent and ugly obviousness, set 
there between the majestic pillars of an alien religion, it is 
rather of the nobility of that, past, which is so present every- 
where in Italy — of its beauty and its sufficiency, save in certain 
moments of profound feeling — that we think, than of its 
superstition and decay, in which it would sometimes appear 
it is so closely followed by its Christian successor. And yet 
that is perhaps over-emphasised. Who here in Spoleto can 
resist the touching appeal of that little ugly shrine that 
greets the traveller on his way to S. Paolo, that old thir- 
teenth-century church '? It is a picture of S. Maria Imma- 
colata, and bears the marvellous and lovely legend : ' Et 
macula originalis non est in Te.' As I passed by at evening 
some children were decking the shrine with wild flowers, 
gathered on the Umbrian Hills. The hideous cage that 
guarded Our Lady, perhaps from the stones of the unbelievers, 
was starred with buttercups as lovely in their tender yellow 
as those which doubtless in old days sprang up beneath the 
white footsteps of Persephone as she crossed the rivers of 
Sicily on her way to Demeter, after her unwilling exile from 
our world. Will she not know and smile and understand, this 
Virgin that is the one goddess left to a sorrowful world 1 
Be sure if she is not mindful of the flowers of the maidens 
and children, if in that Heaven where she is she does not 
smile to her Son upon His Throne of chrysoprase and jasper 
to see these, simple of heart, bringing the flowers of the 
field for her Festa — ah, then, Persephone never trod our 
world, nor was Demeter bereft and sorrowful ; all, all, is a 
lie — the beautiful, austere gods, the terrible love of Christ, 
the very Fatherhood of God, since even these so simple 
of heart may deceive themselves on their lovely way to 
death. 



SPOLETO 69 

The convent of S. Paolo is now used as a poorhouse, 
round whose walls is pictured, not inappropriately perhaps, 
the Way of the Cross. In so peaceful a spot amid the 
cypresses and olives, those who have been a little defeated in 
a wonderful world contemplate the way to heaven. But 
whatever it may be that attracts us so strongly in Spoleto, 
she remains a very perfect city of light and joy. S. Pietro, 
that magnificent fragment of Romanesque architecture over- 
looking the ravine, is but another example of her simplicity 
and piety. Behind the church rises the wooded Monte Luco, 
and on a platform, reached by a series of antique steps, 
this church, perhaps the most striking Romanesque building 
in Italy, has stood for more than a thousand years. Its 
facade is sculptured in reliefs with moral fables, partly from 
the Bestiaries. Here the wolf feigns penitence in order to 
capture the lamb ; the fox lies on his back, to all appearance 
dead, in order to seize the more surely the foolish doves. 
But it is only in this splendid and simple fa9ade that the 
lover of beauty, for whom, after all, all architecture and 
painting and sculpture and literature really exist, will find 
delight; the church itself is but the mediocre whitewashed 
barn we grow so accustomed to in the south ; with nothing 
really to recommend it, existing as it does without the 
mysticism and beauty of the Gothic building, or the sense 
of space and light to be found in the Romanesque and in the 
buildings of the Renaissance. 

It was Holy AVeek when I came to Spoleto ; a certain silence 
and wistful sadness, very touching in their simplicity, seemed 
to invest the city ; the streets were very quiet, the churches 
sombre and mysterious. All day long I watched the pro- 
cessions, with their torches and innumerable tapers, wind 
along the hot roads ; all night as -I lay in my bed I seemed 
to hear the sombre chants that accompanied them up an end- 
less Via Crucis. In reality it would seem Christ died this 



70 THE CITIES OF UMBEIA 

afternoon. It is true ; now at last mankind is desolate. The 
tones of the Vexilla Regis seem to wave like long streamers 
from the church towers. Here, at any rate, we have heard 
the Bride, heart-broken and weeping, sigh to the world that 
is, it seems, spread out in its entirety at our feet : — 

' vos omnes qui transitis per viam, attendite et videte, 
si est dolor sicut dolor meus.' 

Then there is silence. Spoleto, with finger on her lip, awaits 
the dawn of Easter. At last it breaks, very cool and sweet 
and full of promises. An immense hope seems to have swept 
over the world. In the churches they sing again Alleluia, 
and I, with the whole city, go to the cathedral to greet the 
Christ, now risen from the tomb, in the Easter Mass. It is 
for me, at least, the world of true Eomance — the real world of 
my dreams. At home Easter is so noisy, so icily jubilant, 
and only a little because Christ is risen from the dead — if 
indeed we remind ourselves at all of so old, so far-fetched a 
story. For the most part, in England, Easter is a festival of 
a short cessation from toil, in which brief moment it would 
be fatal to happiness to think of any sombre thing. But 
here in Umbria — the real Italia Mystica — the days of Holy 
Week and Easter seem endless. 

Out of my window, as I write, I can see St. Mary of the 
Angels gleaming in the sunlight beneath the mass of 
Subasio. It is only the mountains that hide Orvieto from 
me, and even perhaps Rome herself. The coiling Tiber 
shines for miles on his way to the Eternal City and the sea, 
and innumerable roads wind over plain and mountain to half 
a hundred cities that the world has forgotten. I seem to see 
them all in the soft lucidity of evening, that is the most 
spacious part of the day in this land where, every evening, 
God paints for us those pictures which taught Perugino all 
he knew — his magnificent spaciousness, his sense of luminous 



SPOLETO 71 

light. Before the sunset Spoleto, like a tall and sweet 
maiden, kneels on her hill and seems to pray. Ever she has 
the attitude of prayer ; and after dark when her little lights 
gleam far over the ravine, I seem to know that they burn 
before the shrines of many saints whose prayers she has 
desired, simple of heart as she is, kneeling at the head of her 
long valley under the soft sky. 



VII 

ON THE WAY TO NARNI 

THEOUGH the valleys of oak and ilex I set out on a 
fair morning as ever was, before the sun was high, for 
Terni and her falls, which, as it happened, I was never to 
see ; for I had scarcely gone five miles on my way when I 
was overtaken by one of those sudden storms of wind and 
hail and rain that are not uncommon in the valleys round 
the Tiber. Is it not of such a tempest that Virgil, the 
Prince of Poets, has warned us, so that we may note its 
coming ? 

' Continuo ventis surgentibus aut freta ponti 
Incipiunt agitata tumescere et aridus altis 
Montibus audiri fragor, aut resonantia longe 
Litora misceri et nemorum increbrescere munnur.' 

But I was heedless; and, taken with the beauty of the 
way, I had not observed the signs infallible of the moon, or 
the sudden swift flight of the stars sweeping over the sky. 
Not till the murmur of the woods prevailed against the 
whisper of the summer day did I understand that Nature 
was awake and angered, her heart tumultuous with some 
passionate remembrance, and she herself singing upon the 
mountains. Through the valley under the storm I went 
rejoicing ; it was one of the great days of my life. I was 
drenched with the rain, and the hailstones cut my face like 
a whip, and the great wind embraced me. What cared I 
for a wet skin 1 I was alone with the world, and I loved her. 

72 



ON THE WAY TO NARNI 73 

The long white road hissed before me, and suddenly, as it 
seemed, under the fury of the storm, was overcome and no 
longer resisted the invincible rain, but was musical with a 
million fountains. All Nature sighed in the ecstasy of that 
embrace, and spoke in the song of the storm of the antique 
tragedies of the world. And I alone heard it all in the 
sacred groves of ilex in the old and beautiful valley, through 
which a little river ran hurrying before me. 

It was raining still when I came to Terni ; and being, as 
I have said, wet to the skin, I went to bed in the inn of my 
country while my host dried my clothes. And the next day 
and the next it rained, and so it happened that I did not 
see the famous falls of which Childe Harold wrote so well, 
but went on to Narni ignominiously by train. 

I came to Narni in the evening, and immediately it was 
fine weather. So I knew I had done well, seeing that I had 
bowed to the will of some unpropitiated saint or forsaken 
god who had decreed that I should not see the Cascate delle 
Marmore. 

The ' Angelo' at Narni is an inn of no great pretensions, 
but the host is a good host, and understands that for so 
magnificent a person as your lordship nothing is good 
enough. He is proud of his picturesque and antique city, 
but especially is he proud of his view, which is more 
wonderful than his tale, and the great Roman bridge, so 
magnificent a ruin, that strives in vain to grapple the 
shores of Nera. And, indeed, he is right; the Ponte di 
Augusto is one of the most beautiful ruins in the world, 
chiefly perhaps because it has been left alone with age and 
death. In its youth and prime it carried the Via Flaminia 
towards Rome ; in its age it warns us of the desolate splen- 
dours that the Eternal City still guards. An outpost of 
the Campagna, it knows the gods are dead or dying in the 
loneliness of that mysterious desert which surrounds the 



74 THE CITIES OF UMBEIA 

Capital of the World. What need is there of any splendid 
road to Rome, since the messengers of Christ pursued by 
implacable victory came, not with beauty and delight, in 
gilded chariots and with horses, but in rags with bleeding 
feet 1 Should it bear on its back the brutal and barbaric 
armies of the Goth"? or make the way smooth for the 
strange bedecked columns, gay with harlots and with silk, 
of Charles viii. on his way to Naples, there to find no 
kingdom but an immortal pestilence '? The great days of 
Latin triumph come no more. It is the moment of trumpery 
cities with bridges of iron, foul and unbeautiful. The 
Bridge of Augustus watches the traveller pass by on another 
way to Rome unheeding, remembering only splendid days. 
But still one arch is perfect, waiting for the return of the 
armies of Caesar, which so many ages ago went out to 
conquer the world. 

They have triumphed ; when will they return to avenge 
the spoliation of their City and the death of their immortal 
gods 1 Is it for that return this Bridge of Augustus is 
waiting, not quite ruined, not altogether destroyed, through 
the ignoble centuries ? Ah ! do you not often wonder that 
the gods do "not return to avenge themselves"; that they 
are not enraged at the wounds we have made in their 
indestructible temples ; that they suffer us to deface their 
beautiful statues, to steal their pillars, and to forget them 
altogether, or believe them deadi Looking on this bridge, 
that like a beautiful broken bow lies useless beside the 
stream, can you doubt of their return, since all the con- 
trivance of man since they left us has failed to produce a 
thing so beautiful and so strong 1 

There is but little to be seen in Narni itself. The Duomo 
is now chiefly a building of the sixteenth century ; it holds 
a few old marbles, a curious screen, nothing more. 

In the Palazzo Municipio there are also some old sculptures, 



ON THE WAY TO NARNI 75 

together with a fresco by Lo Spagna of ' St. Francis receiv- 
ing the Stigmata,' and a fine work of Ghirlandajo, 'The 
Coronation of the Blessed Virgin.' 

But it is not for these things I came to Narni, but to see 
the road to Rome, that used to march with so much con- 
fidence and pride over that broken bridge, beside which, as 
in the days of Augustus, so to-day, the irony of the gods has 
permitted still to flow 

' Sulfurea Nar albus aqua fontesque Velini.' 



VIII 
TODI 

IT was one night at Narni, a night of many nights, when I 
had assured myself often enough that it was too hot to 
go to Eome, that I decided to make a long journey by road to 
Orvieto, where I had agreed with myself that I, wished to be. 
I made up my mind to this far departure from the railway 
the more readily, since I should thus see Todi, a little city very 
awkwardly situated for the tourist, but nothing so bad for the 
traveller. I had been told that without its gates I should find 
the most beautiful church in the world. It is true that he who 
brought me this news added, that I at least should think so ; 
but it was the last reservation in the world to encourage me 
to give up my journey, since it appeared that he knew of my 
love for Eomanesque and Renaissance buildings and told me 
accordingly of one of the finest in Italy. Todi was, more- 
over, the city of the ever-famous Jacopone, who made the 
most lovely of songs, Stabat Mater Speciosa. 

The way was a pleasant way, as all ways are, be sure, in 
Umbria, and it was hot. I slept an hour at S. Gemini 
in a kind of barn among the hay, and travelled by good luck 
on a great country wine-cart as far as a place whose name I 
have forgotten — it was but a handful of houses ; and at sun- 
set, by the help of a great Lord who courteously gave me a 
seat in a most splendid and strange coach, I was not far from 
Todi, where I came at last out of the immense darkness of 
the Umbrian night. I was alone in the valley ; night came so 

76 




DUOMO, TODI 



TODI 77 

swiftly that she had caught me still on the road. After a time 
I came to a parting of the ways, of which one seemed to climb 
uphill, the other to go straight on. And I sat down by 
the roadside. The great cypress under which I found my- 
seK was moaning in the wind that came gently through the 
darkness, filled with the odour of some flower. Suddenly I 
looked up. Aloft, on what seemed to be a mighty hill, a 
single light showed me that there lay the city I had come so 
far to see. A single bell tolled the hour ; somewhere, it 
seemed far away, a woman began to sing for a moment, then 
there was silence. 

Softly behind me a man came out of the darkness that was 
a little desolate. When he saw me sitting by the roadside, 
he stopped and looked at me for some time. Presently 
he spoke. . 

'The Signore desires to go up to the city?' he said, not 
without a certain kindness. 

Yes, that was the Signore's wish. 

Well, then, he would carry the Signore's knapsack, since 
it was a great distance and steep — but steep. 

So we set off, he a little in advance. A noise of running 
water was the only thing audible, but presently that too died 
away, and we were in the great silence of night upon the 
hills. Overhead heaven was precious with stars, and the 
great snow-capped Apennines across the valley, miles and 
miles away, seemed like the immaculate memorials of angels 
slain in the fight with Lucifer thousands of years ago. Some- 
. times, as we came to a turning of the way that wound ever 
upwards, we rested for a moment beside what at first seemed 
to be a rough shelter of heaped-up stones, for the hill is 
stony, but which I found was an old station of the Via 
Crucis — this very road which we were climbing so laboriously 
— now in ruin, its frescoes almost obliterated, its crucifix 
gone for ever. Soon everything but night and a sense of the 



78 THE CITIES OF UMBRIA 

immense space everywhere round us, in which the stars hung 
like many lovely lamps, fell away from me. We seemed 
utterly alone. A kind of terror at the depth of the silence 
seized me ; and I am sure my companion, who still kept a 
little ahead of me as though to show the way, was a little 
fearful too — his eyes were so wide and bright, and he stepped 
so carefully and softly. At last the weight of the loneliness, 
the unbreakable silence, became unbearable, and it was 
almost with a cry of relief that I came quite suddenly to the 
gate of the city and so to the inn, which was in darkness. 
My companion set down my bag and pulled the bell for me, 
and then, when I had paid him what he desired, disappeared 
into the darkness. 

Todi is one of the most ancient cities in Umbria ; it boasts 
of a foundation older than that of Rome. Its walls are 
certainly in part Etruscan, patched by the Romans, and 
destroyed by the Middle Age and Renaissance, that have left 
their mark, how splendidly, on this little city built on so 
precipitous a hill. In its day, surely, it was a place of some 
renown and greatness, seeing that there is so much ruined 
splendour even now within its walls. And I for one find it to- 
day one of the greatest surprises in Umbria. No one goes there. 
It is far from the beaten track, thirty miles from. Orvieto, 
which is itself a silent, forgotten city, passed almost always 
by the hurried tourist eager for Rome or some famous city of 
Tuscany. Perugia whom the tourists have violated, with 
her two great hotels, is more than thirty miles to the north 
of Todi, who on her terrible hill has, after all, but little to 
offer them. But for us who are not in a hurry Todi holds 
much — a great and beautiful Piazza, more than one very lovely 
church, and Silence. You hear no train, even in the stillest 
night ; no tram rushes past your windows to remind you of 
the horrible new world that has only time for action, that 
has forgotten to think. Ah ! it is not happy, that great 



TODI 79 

modern world from which I have fled away, and it desires 
happiness so eagerly, and is not perhaps altogether un- 
deserving of it, since it has been unhappy so long. And why 1 
Has it not driven Beauty away to suoh eagle-nests as this '? 
And it is here, indeed, we find her in tears, but free upon the 
mountains. Not chained in the galleries of the cities of the 
people, where even the most brutal and the most base may 
gaze upon her and defile her "wdth their thoughts, but free in 
her own world, which we are stealing from her, under the soft 
unsullied sky, among simple people who live with her and are 
glad because she is there. It is good to live in such places, 
however simple they may be ; it is good to live with men who 
have never understood the slavery that our own contrivances 
are thrusting upon us, to look a little at the stars and to feel 
the heat of the sun. 

In that beautiful Piazza between the Duomo and the 
Palazzo Municipio at Todi what thoughts will not adventure, 
even to us, from the beautiful indestructible centuries. It is 
in such solitude we begin to understand those things which 
the world has been content to forget so disastrously. Here, 
surrounded by a garden, vast and interminable, under the 
shadow of the laurels and the roses, I have watched the giant 
cypresses, each solitary as a god, count the innumerable 
hours ; and I have understood something of the profound joy 
of that troubadour of God, who beheld as it were in a vision 
one of the most beautiful and terrible tragedies of the 
world, and carved it there in immortal verse. Looking back 
now on those fortunate days, when from the cool shade at 
sunset I looked down on burning Umbria and many smoulder- 
ing cities, I know that even those tearless sorrows that dry 
up the roots of life, those brutal disappointments that can 
never be erased from the memory, may be made into a kind 
of beauty, into an almost perfect music in the midst of so 
beautiful a city that is dead. 



80 THE CITIES OF UMBRIA 

It is perhaps as you stand in the Piazza before the Palazzo 
Municipio that you begin to feel how beautiful a city Todi 
really is. To the north the cathedral, beautiful by reason 
of its proportions and its simplicity, brings you a kind of 
joy. It is a Romanesque church of great beauty, with a 
facade of later work. A fine stairway leads up to the 
three doors, 'each surmounted by a wheel,' which are some- 
what elaborate ; they are of the fifteenth century. But the 
main part of the church is of the eleventh century ; and 
beautiful as it is as seen from the Piazza, it is from the east 
that it appears to best advantage, when all that you can see 
is eleventh century work. The variety of the ornament is 
extraordinary ; this is noticeable especially in the windows 
and the columns which support the arcade. The interior is 
less lovely, but even there the beauty of the proportion of 
the building makes itself felt, and you forget the later 
additions and alterations in the severity of the original 
design. The choir is of the fourteenth century, and covers a 
crypt where are certain paintings of little interest by Lo 
Spagna. You feel always that the church would have been 
lovelier with less ornament. The fourteenth and fifteenth 
centuries ha^v^e really spoiled a building that must once have 
been of far greater beauty than to-day. 

The Palazzo Municipio, which for want of a better name 
passes as Gothic architecture, shuts in the east side of the 
Piazza. The windows are beautiful, and the staircase finer 
than the one at Perugia. There is a small Pinacoteca on the 
ground floor, where you may find a picture or two by Lo 
Spagna ; among them a Coronation of the Virgin painted in 
1511. The Renaissance palace on the south side of the 
Piazza — its name escapes me — is beautiful too; indeed the 
whole Piazza is lovely, and never sufficiently to be praised. 

The two churches of S. Ilario and S. Fortunato, built in 
the thirteenth century (the one in 1249, the other in 1292) are 




PALAZZO PUBBLICO, TODI 



TODI 81 

also worthy of praise. The facade of S. Ilario restored, but 
not so brutally as usual, is very fine. But it is to S. 
Fortunato that we return again and again. This magnifi- 
cent Eomanesque church has a flight of steps like to the 
cathedral, which leads to three doors. Only the middle one 
is pointed, however, the others being round ; while in the 
late fa9ade of the cathedral there are three pointed doors. 
The fa9ade here, however, would seem to be also of the 
fifteenth century, as is without doubt the vaulting. 

In the Dominican church of S. Maria in Camuccia, there 
is a number of frescoes ; one of a Virgin della Misericordia, 
and several of the Virgin and Child. They are, as I think, 
worth study, being of some antiquity, though restored in 
parts possibly in the fifteenth century. 

But, after all, it is to the great church of S. Maria della 
Consolazione that the traveller will turn with the greatest 
eagerness. Built as many have supposed by Bramante, but 
given now to Cola di Mattuccio, it is one of the most lovely 
if not the loveliest of Eenaissance churches in Italy — that is 
to say, in the world. Here at last we have a really fine 
realisation of the Renaissance ideal in architecture. Not a 
perfect realisation of it by any means, but the best we 
possess. It is well to remember, in looking on this church, 
what S. Pietro might have been but for the so-called 
Reformation and all the evil it worked for Art. The idea of 
Bramante, it will be remembered, was to build a church in 
the shape of a Greek cross under a dome. It was an effect 
of light and space he aimed at, light and space confined, and 
therefore not confined within a perfectly proportioned build- 
ing. Well, the Reformation came, and spoiled all that. Rome 
remembered the pilgrims from the North, and considering 
how important it was that such as .they should be impressed, 
decided to build that long nave which, to-day makes of St. 
Peter's — well, not a beautiful church, but one into which you 



82 THE CITIES OF UMBRIA 

can pack eighty thousand people. Coming into S. Maria 
della Consolazione we realise for the first time perhaps what 
we have lost. It is not a church ; it is a magical space in 
heaven between the sun and moon, and the light is level and 
beautiful. It is strange this .effect of space — absolute space, 
flight almost, in what is really so small a building. And it 
is right that this ideal should have been achieved, if anywhere 
then in Umbria, where the beauty of the whole country is 
really that sense of lightness, of light and spacious air. It 
is the secret that Umbria has striven to confide to the world 
through many painters : through Piero della Francesca, 
through Perugino, and at last through the sweet profound 
genius of Raphael. These men composed with' space as a 
musician composes with sound, and indeed the effect is very 
like. You seem suddenly to have stepped out of our world 
into a pure and clear sunlight, not terrifying by its infinity, 
but enfolding us with security and a kind of perfection. 
You gaze only upwards. That dome borne on the wings of 
clouds on clouds of angels, soars in its beauty .and its per- 
fection like a splendid and irresistible thought in the mind 
of man. There is no uncertainty, no dimness, no tricks of 
shadow, no self-accusation, no deceit, no fear, ho shame at 
all, but the clear light of the sky that is the most lovely and 
precious thing in the world. And it is thus, clothed in joyful 
and beautiful thoughts, that man has chosen at last to meet 
his God. You think there is no mysticism in that, no mystery 1 
Ah ! you do riot know the mystical power — strange and more 
wonderful than the spirit of the forests of the North, or of 
the cathedrals of the Gaul and the Goth — to be found in the 
unappeasable sunlight of a still, hot day. That Silence is 
more profound than the whispering depths of the most 
ancient forest, or the echoing intricate splendours, the dim 
unseen vaultings of the great mad churches of the North. 
If in the already worshipped Sun there be mystery, or in 



TODI 83 

the unpierced Heaven there be angels, though we may not 
see j if in silence surrounded by light and the immense lone- 
liness of space, God wanders so that I. may find Him always 
near, then that Latin genius, which has taught us all the 
Arts as a mother teaches her children, and to which we owe 
everything that is precious in the world, has not made this 
unthinkable failure in architecture of which we accuse her 
so easily, but has comprehended there too more than she has 
ever been able to lead us so far as to apprehend ; and we in 
our gloomy, miserable lands, living like wild beasts in our 
forests in the most splendid days, dragged away like the 
brutes to make a holiday more strange in Rome, a spectacle 
more terrible, preferring even now darkness before light, 
barbarous and sad in our trumpery cities, must acknowledge 
at last with what grace we may the indestructible, untiring 
genius of Latin blood, that with us, lost in our fog, it has 
become the fashion to scoff at and to despise. 



IX 
ORVIETO 

THE way to Orvieto, that city of convents and monasteries, 
on her bastioned hill of pale and tawny tufa, is 
difficult. Not many seek her out in her sileiice and her 
solitude ; she is so strange and sorrowful in the' midst of that 
barren landscape, burnt by the sun, wasted by the wind, 
cleansed by the rain, gay only with forgotten garlands. 
She is the city of a miracle, herself the greatest miracle of 
all. Through her streets pass and repass, haggard and 
fantastical, the beautiful or brutal dreams of the Middle 
Age. Still she wanders, as it were, in a mystical desert, 
and every morning sees that faint mirage of the heavenly 
city, and every evening watches Christ's blood. flame in the 
firmament. Her brows are still bound with sacred gold, 
her crown is still splendid with jewels, still in her heart 
of hearts she guards the Eucharist ; but her life is so languid 
that the grass grows in her streets, she is so silent that you 
might think her without inhabitants. In all that melancholy 
valley, she alone, high on her rock, is splendid and beautiful 
like a star fallen on the mountains. 

But it is not to the impatient traveller that this city 
of great silences, and the immense intervals of meditation, 
will reveal her secret ; but to him who, having spent suffi- 
cient time in the silence of her Cathedral, has cleansed his 
heart so that he may understand her story. You might 
almost say that within her walls is contained the whole 

84 



OEVIETO 85 

Christian mythos, beginning with Genesis and ending with 
the Coronation of the Blessed Virgin ; the centre, the climax, 
the supreme mystery of the whole being the tremendous secret 
of the Doctrine of the Blessed Sacrament. And it is not in the 
Cathedral alone that Orvieto declares to us that Christianity 
has conquered a reluctant world, for in herself she is a 
monument of that victory. In the Piazza del Duomo there 
are four buildings beside the Duomo that are inevitably 
connected with the Church, and so with Christ. The oldest 
the Palace of the Bishop, stands beyond the cathedral, and 
though begun in 977 and enlarged by Adrian iv. in 1151, it 
is now mainly a building of the sixteenth century. We 
then turn to the Palace of the Popes — Palazzo Soliano, that 
with the decay of religion has been turned into a museum — 
built by Boniface viii. in the end of the thirteenth century. 
Beside this palace rises the Ospedale, built in the end of the 
twelfth century, and opposite the cathedral itself we find 
the Opera del Duomo, built in the fourteenth century, a 
magnificent piece of work. Thus for Orvieto, at least, half 
her life was laid up in heaven, where also her treasure was. 
For it was to a miracle that she owed not only her beauty 
but her true being, there on her great rock over her melan- 
choly valley— a very miracle herself, famous and holding gifts. 
And even as she owed her splendour to the blood of Christ, 
so she seems to have desired the blood of man ; staining her 
streets with that mystical and shameful river in the month 
of August 1312, and at other times, when civil war reigned 
in the streets and many hundreds of citizens perished. 
And, whether under the Monaldeschi or the Popes, or the 
Neapolitan king, always her streets ran with blood — it is as 
it were the very symbol of herself. 

The miracle of Bolsena, which the cathedral of Orvieto 
was built to commemorate, happened in this wise. Eaphael 
with his profound and scholarly insight has painted it, as it 



86 THE CITIES OF UMBEIA 

is supposed, opposite to the 'School of Athens' in the 
Vatican. A certain German priest — even then it might 
seem that the Teutonic intelligence was less trained, less 
sure of its own limitations than the Latin mind — had 
presumed to doubt in the little town of Orvieto the doctrine 
of the Eeal Presence of Our Lord in the Blessed Sacrament. 
Utterly tired and weary of his doubts, disturbed by his 
uncertainty, he set out for Kome, so that there, in the 
capital of his religion, he might decide at last or be 
persuaded. For it began to appear plain to him that if this 
which he dared to doubt were indeed untrue, then other things, 
that he had scarcely thought of as yet, might be untrue 
also. It was, therefore, we may well believe, in a certain 
sadness of heart that he set out for Rome, and ' resting one 
day on the shores of the beautiful lake of Bolsena, he, at the 
request of the villagers, celebrated a Mass for them in the 
church of Santa Cristina, which is with us even to this day.' 
And although Santa Cristina is rejected by all authority, 
she has her lovers in the sweet Umbrian country who will 
never forget her; and perhaps for their love she brought 
these things to pass, being in heaven at the time. For it 
happened that as our German doubter (Raphael says he was 
but a lad) elevated the Host, more than ever troubled in 
his mind concerning the doctrine that none of . those simple 
folk in the church there thought of doubting for a moment, 
he saw drops of red blood upon the Corporal, ' each stain 
severally assuming the form of a human head with features 
like the "Yolto Santo," a portrait of our Saviour.' Oh, 
wonderful ! What shame in his heart, what anger at his 
doubts, what love, what certainty, what gladness ! Over- 
come by fear and reverence, he, sinner that he was, dared 
not consume the Holy Species ; but with eagerness, with 
love, reserved the Body of Our Lord, and travelling in haste 
to Orvieto, where the Pope then was, he, not without shame, 



ORVIETO 87 

confessed to him not only the miracle, but his doubts also. 
The Bishop of Orvieto at the command of the Pope hastened 
to Bolsena, and brought from the altar of Santa Cristina 
the Sacred Host and the Blessed ' Corporal. The Pope 
himself — Urban iv. it was — passed with all the splendid 
clergy, with joy, with music, in procession to meet him, 
who indeed bore Christ along with him. 

Thus was instituted the magnificent festival of Corpus 
Christi, whose office St. Thomas Aquinas, the angelical 
doctor, composed. The Sacred Host rests to-day in the 
Cappella del Corporale in the Cathedral, surrounded by the 
magnificent frescoes of Ugolino di Prete d'llario, that tell 
the story to the world. As you descend to-day through the 
vineyard to Bolsena, past the antique town of Bagnorea, the 
birthplace of the author of The Nightingale of the Passion of our 
Lord, .and The Journey of the Soul to God, known to us as 
S. Buonaventura, something of that ancient mystery seems 
still to invest the little city with a languid and fantastic 
beauty, a silence so profound, a light, a sunshine, so subtle. 
Forlorn upon her lake, over that pale green water, there 
came to her at dawn — perhaps in the very hour which freed 
us from eternal sleep — a whisper of that winged mystery 
which has confounded the world. For if Christ's life was 
a miracle of mystical years, numbering thirty-three. His 
Eesurrection was, as it were, the triumphant solution of that 
miracle into a law and commonplace for the world ; and His 
presence in such absolute, simple, and elementary things as 
bread and wine, changing their simplicity into His subtile 
life, His exquisite beauty, is a piece of profound poetry strange 
enough to be believed, too beautiful to be untrue, in keeping 
with the belief of the whole world, which has already 
apprehended during countless millenniums the God hidden in 
the vine, the divine nature of bread, of life. And, indeed, 
this country — volcanic, tawny, and ardent, strew^n with 



88 THE CITIES OF UMBRIA 

strange rocks of basalt in the mysterious shapes of temples 
of hundreds of forgotten religions — here a quincunx, there a 
triangle or circle — was created for the manifestation of some 
divine thing which we cannot understand. Doubtless the 
miracle of the Yolto Santo was not the first that happened 
here. Cristina, saint and martyr, though without the 
Roman Calendar, had seen angels hovering over that pallid 
lake, and had talked with them, and they had clothed her at 
last in a wonderful white garment, as she was almost sinking 
in its waters with a great stone tied round her neck by 
her murderers. And yet, as ever happens in the lives of 
the saints, so disappointingly, so dishearteningly, though God 
Himself interfere for any virgin or golden lad, of all of them 
not one but in the end died the victim of his foes. It is but 
for a moment that heaven interposes betwixt the saints and 
death ; in the end martyrdom, only delayed by the menace 
of heaven, has its way with them, and they pass out the 
victorious victims of the impotence or the unwillingness of 
heaven, of the brutality of man. So it was with Cristina. 
Three times the angels saved her, only to let her perish at 
last by a far more horrible death than drowning. So have 
the gods ever defended those who loved them. 

Thus in simple days miracles happened and men believed, 
and chased the devil down the vistas of his own damnable 
doubts. To us valiant shopkeepers who believe in science, 
who dispute about the reality of matter, all that is doubt- 
less but a fairy tale at best ; some of us even may be so strict 
as to call that miracle of Bolsena and the convenient G-erman 
priest, a lie — yet I can but hope they are few. Truth or lie, 
or what you will, it has built the Cathedral of Orvieto ; nor 
is there anything more marvellous upon earth. Era Angelico 
did not hesitate to spend his genius on her walls. Signorelli, 
who is so much greater than his fame, in 1499 began to paint 
the vaulting and the walls ; and amid all the magnificence and 



ORYIETO 89 

richness of the work around one, it is again and again to his 
work that the traveller mil return — always with joy. 

The Duomo as it stands to-day is in form of a Latin cross, 
consisting of a long and broad nave, with two aisles divided 
from the nave by pillars, two large chapels to the north and 
south of what would be the transepts in a Gothic church, and 
a kind of square chancel. The artist who designed this 
strange building, so glorious without, so sombre within, is 
unknown. You have heard a whisper of Arnolfo di Cambio 
and of some unknown master of the Roman school, and yet it 
seems impossible that Arnolfo should have had any hand in it. 
The Cathedral, which was originally without the two transept 
chapels, is Romanesque in style, probably built in imitation 
of S. Maria Maggiore in Rome, that great Latin church which 
was, after all, the cradle of Christianity. It is really a matter 
of indifference who was the architect, for the church of 
Or-vdeto is not a beautiful church — it is ill constructed ; soon 
after it was built it was decided to add a transept, and the 
two chapels to north and south were glued on, as it were, to 
the cathedral. The church, badly built in the first place, and 
terrible wounded by this addition, began to fall to pieces. 

It was in 1310 that Lorenzo del Maitano was brought from 
Siena to buttress the gaping walls of the Duomo, to restore 
the fabric in many particulars, and to design and to build 
the fa9ade ; and it is, so far as the building is concerned, with 
this facade that we concern ourselves to-day. It is in itself 
one of the most extraordinary works of art in Italy, while the 
church is a mere building, and as such almost entirely without 
interest. 'Imagine,' says d'Annunzio, 'imagine a rock in the 
midst of a melancholy valley, and on the top of the rock a 
city so deathly silent as to give the impression of being unin- 
habited — every window closed, gra.ss growing in the dusty 
grey streets. A Capuchin friar crosses the Piazza, a priest 
descends from a closed carriage in front of an hospital, all in 



90 THE CITIES OF UMBRIA 

black, with a decrepit old servant to open the door ; here a 
tower against the white, rain-sodden clouds, there a clock 
slowly striking the hour, and suddenly, at the end of a street, 
a miracle — the Duomo.' 

And it is really as a kind of miracle — an exquisite painted 
frontispiece to the church of a miracle — that we look on the 
fa9ade to-day flaming in the sunshine. It is a kind of precious 
marble, carved and subtly contrived and set with gems. 
Jewelled with a cunning and profound knowledge beyond 
the art of the goldsmith, it shines to-day almost like a casket, 
since it is not till later we discover it is only a single wall, 
only a fagade after all, with no real relation to the rest of 
the church, which might have been finished in- various other 
ways no more incongruous than this. In this want of 
inevitable relation to the church itself, the fa9ade of the 
cathedral here at Orvieto is like to that of the Duomo at 
Siena, only perhaps a little less incongruous, a little more in 
place, and it may well be that it is owing to French influence, 
just then beginning to count for something in Italy, that the 
fa9ade is to a large extent sculptured and has three gables. 
The question of French influence in Italian work is an inter- 
esting one, as yet only lightly touched upon by historians of 
Art, but as it seems to me of no little importance to us since 
we find it in the work even of such a Eealist, such a humble 
student of Nature, as Donatello. Lorenzo del Maitano made 
many drawings for the fa9ade, of which two, certainly, 
are preserved in the Opera del Duomo to-day. Here in 
Orvieto, however, French influence is to be found in the 
gradual substitution of three gables for the one of the earlier 
drawing. It is well to remind ourselves, as we look on this 
marvellous fa9ade, that it was the wotk of Sienese artists of 
the beginning and middle of the fourteenth century, and to 
remember too that the fa9ade of the cathedral at Siena was 
not begun at that time. The Sienese sculptors were for the 



OEVIETO 91 

most part pupils of the school of Giovanni Pisano/ they 
were therefore practised in the art of sculpturing bas-relief. 
Mr. Langton Douglas has proved almost beyond a doubt, in 
a very able and delightful paper ^ on the cathedral of Orvieto, 
that the work in bas-relief on the pilasters and fa9ade is from 
the hands of Maitano and his pupils. He believes that the 
reliefs were completed in 1321, since it was in that year, nine 
years before his death, that Maitano set up the fabhrka of 
mosaic. 

'The reliefs on the pilasters of the facade of Orvieto 
Cathedral,' he says, 'were executed in the period 1310 to 
1321, in part by Lorenzo del Maitano, in part under his 
supervision. They belong to the golden age of the art of 
Siena : to the age of Duccio and Simone Martini, to the age 
of Pietro and Ambrozio Lorenzetti, to the age of the archi- 
tects of the great unfinished cathedral. Maitano was an 
artistic kinsman of Simone. Like Simone he owed a great 
deal to the influence of Giovanni Pisano. Like Simone he 
was a great designer. He had, too, something of that painter's 
marvellous grace of line, something of his devotion to an 
hieratic sumptuousness, something of his love of brilliant 
colour, as well as something of his extraordinary fineness — 
we might almost say fastidiousness — of technique. Except- 
ing the works of Jacopo della Querela, the reliefs of Orvieto 
were the greatest achievement of the Sienese school of 
sculpture.' 

' The greatest achievement of the Sienese school of 
sculpture ' ; and when we remember the imm^ense superiority 
of the Sienese school at that time, we shall not surely under- 
value the splendour of this achievement. Among the most 
lovely things in Italy, certainly anywhere else they are 
unequalled. It is necessary to go back to the Greeks — yes, in 

^ See Fumi, II Duomo d'' Orvieto ei suoi Eestauri, p. 92. 
^ See Architectural Review, June 1903, p. 203. 



92 THE CITIES OF UMBEIA 

spite of the splendour of Chartres, and the Gothic and yet 
Classical sculptures of the North — to find their fellows. But 
as with all Sienese work, the pictures of Duccio and Simone 
Martini, so here we find a satisfaction with mere splendour 
and graciousness, a desire for beauty but not for life or 
strength. A little conventionally, one might say, these Sienese 
artists deal with their art, and yet after all, where, for more 
than two hundred years, will you find such a sense of form, 
such a delight in beauty and simplicity 1 What pathos in 
that figure of Adam who is dead or ever he had life, whom 
God approaches so eagerly, so graciously in the garden. The 
astonished angels wait, with how profound an agitation, for 
this new thing. And again, when that deep sleep fell upon 
our father, and God with blessing — for He does bless her — 
draws woman from his side, how he seems just to sleep as 
one weary after the pleasures of the day, for he is alive and 
dead no longer. Two angels hesitate in the garden among 
the trees, the one seeming to tell the other of all that had 
gone before, while Adam lay a marvellous shape of dust 
waiting the touch of the finger of God. As you look on this 
strange, pathetic figure of Man, the sublime dream of 
Michael Angelo comes to you as he painted it on the roof of 
the Sistine Chapel. For there Man, half alive, lies over the 
world and stretches out his finger — ah, languidly — to touch 
the finger of God ; he is almost unconscious, still wrapped 
round by dreams, yet a touch of the finger-tips will suffice 
to awaken him to life itself, and all that God holds, woman 
and the future, in the fold of His garment. 

The whole history of the Creation is expressed on this fa9ade, 
sometimes with a kind of realism, sometimes with a kind 
of half-discovered symbolism. Thus Christ is the chief 
figure in the creation of the world, God the Father being 
represented by a hand, and the Holy Spirit by the Dove, 
with outspread wings hovering over the waters and the 



ORVIETO 93 

world, among the stars. And again what energy, what 
realism in that figure of Adam where he stands with Eve 
for a moment beneath the tree of knowledge, and God 
almost with a kind of severity forbids them to eat of that 
fruit. Eve listens with a certain meekness, an almost 
superficial and easy acquiescence. But Adam stands at his 
full height and looks God in the eyes as a beloved son, and 
really understands that this tree which he touches with his 
fingers bears the forbidden fruit. And so this poem in 
stone, not less than the perfect page of the English Bible, or 
Milton, tells the valiant tale of the tragedy of Man, and the 
Redemption of the world. And at last in those two reliefs 
of the Resurrection and of Hell, we find — well, a kind of 
understanding very different from that of an artist so close 
to that time as the painter of the Triumph of Death at Pisa. 
Maitano was, in his fashion, certainly Sienese, but still 
naturalistic, concerned with men and women rather than 
with stories or ideas. How the people crowd in the upper 
part of the Resurrection, how they press forward almost with 
passion towards the light, herded almost in the first dazzling 
ecstasy of that resurrection by their angels ! And in the 
lower part how they struggle and thrust aside the stones of 
their graves ! Many have already stepped half out before 
they have thrust away the lid of the tomb for ever. 

In the relief of the Hell, a kind of brutal emotion, half 
hideous laughter, half despair and weeping, has swept over 
these poor people tortured by devils. Their fate has driven 
them mad. They no longer feel anything but a kind of 
stupid terror ; while the Vine, that is Christ, loaded with 
fruit, sweeps upwards for ever beyond the gaze of their dull 
agonised eyes. 

Well, it is to find such work as this that we have come to 
Orvieto ; nor, so far as I know, will you find anything like 
it in all Italy, 



94 THE CITIES OF UMBRIA 

But Maitano, that great artist, was not content to design 
the facade and to cover it with reliefs ; he designed the 
mosaics also. 'He set up a fahbrica of mosaic in Orvieto 
in 1321/ says Mr. Langton Douglas, 'and the early mosaic 
pictures on the lower part of the fa9ade were executed by 
him or under his supervision. This work was continued 
by his son Vitale, by Andrea Orcagna, and by other great 
artists. But of the early mosaics that adorned the fa9ade 
not a vestige now remains. It was not until the year 1570, 
two hundred and sixty years after Maitano had begun the 
work, that the fa9ade was completed. Only one important 
alteration was made in the original design, and that was 
the work of another Sienese, Antonio Federighi^ in the 
middle of the fifteenth century. Already in 1417, more 
than thirty years before Federighi took office, proposals 
had been made for a change in the design. Finally in the 
year 1450 Isaia da Pisa had been commissioned to make a 
new design for the uppermost story of the fa9ade. The 
design this artist provided was the cause of great controversy, 
not settled until after Federighi became capo-maestro in the 
year 1451. Federighi finally decided to raise the altitude 
of the central gable of the fa9ade, by inserting a row of 
niches above the circular window similar to those Maitano 
had placed on each side of it. He also increased the height 
of the pinnacles which flanked the central gable. Thus he 
gave the fa9ade a more imposing appearance than it would 
have presented had Maitano's final design been carried 
out. For the rest, the fa9ade to-day differs in no very 
important particular from that designed in the fourteenth 
century.' 

Thus we have, as practically the work of one mind, perhaps, 
the most glorious fa9ade in Italy, one of the finest pieces 
of sculptured architecture in the world. Alas ! it is only a 
frontispiece, of almost tragic beauty, to an inferior church 



ORVIETO 95 

decorated with stripes of black and white marble. In spite 
of the wonder of the tourist, the Duomo of Orvieto is not 
beautiful, it is only strange. Bare and cold as it is, one has 
not the profound sense of space and light as in the churches 
of the Renaissance. No overwhelming sense of greatness and 
beauty excites our tears, as with S. Maria Maggiore at Rome ; 
there is no perfection, no life at all, only a kind of mediocrity, 
a kind of sadness in an old battered church as ugly as old 
age ravaged by disease, in one who can never have been 
beautiful even in youth, but who desiring beauty above all 
things has worn a lovely mask designed by a great artist, 
behind which he hopes to hide his infirmities and the 
wounds of the years. And so it is really only when we pass 
through the western doors and see this great church from 
the inside that we understand how ugly she is. And yet 
even here too she has tried to redeem herself. In the choir 
the naive artists of the countryside have painted the Life 
of the Blessed Virgin and the Advent of Christ. They are 
not beautiful, these little rude acts of faith that are hung 
on the walls with all the assurance of the most pretentious 
votive offerings, but they serve to sanctify, as it were, to 
enliven that strange and barren interior. They redeem the 
church from the sin of accidie, of overmuch sadness, which 
has so terrible a place in Dante's Hell. And in the Cappella 
del Corporale how magnificent is the casket which holds the 
bloodstained Corporal, for which the chapel was built. It 
is perhaps the finest example in Italy of mediaeval gold- 
.smith's work — the work of an artist, Ugolino di Maestro 
Vieri, another Sienese, when the very painters were the 
pupils of such an one. But it is in the Cappella Nuova, the 
Cappella della Madonna di S. Brizio, as it is now called, 
that we shall find the real treasure of the church, rare 
beyond any casket carved with golden roses or the many 
miracles of the church. There in 1447 Fra Angelico has 



96 THE CITIES OF UMBRIA 

painted Our Lord and the Apostles, and Luca Signorelli 
has prophesied of Michelangelo with a greatness all his 
own. So much greater than his fame, this Umbrian from 
Cortona began to paint the vaulting and the walls in 1499. 
And amid all the beauty and richness of the fa9ade and the 
loveliness of Era Angelico, it is again and again to his work 
that the traveller will return — always with joy. Born at 
Cortona in 1440, Vasari declares that in his day his works 
were more esteemed than those of any other master. It is 
strange that they should have fallen into such neglect in 
our own. It is the human form that especially delights 
him, so that in the Uffizi we find a picture called, ' The Virgin 
Holding her Divine Son in her Lap,' in which th^ shepherds in 
the background are naked and unashamed, as in an elder 
age. It is, however, in the Cathedral at Orvieto that we 
find his best work. Says Vasari : * I am not surprised that 
the works of Luca were always highly extolled by Michel- 
angelo, or that for his divine work of the Last Judgment 
in the Sistine Chapel he should have courteously availed 
himself to a certain extent of the inventions of Signorelli, as 
for example, in the angels and demons, in the divisions of 
the heavens, and some other parts, wherein Michelangelo 
imitated the mode of treatment adopted by Luca as may 
be seen by every one.' In looking at his work here in 
Orvieto it is perhaps a question whether Michael borrowed 
to advantage. Nothing more extraordinarily thoughtful and 
subtle than the Anti-Christ is to be found in Michael's Last 
Judgment. So like to Christ as indeed always to be mis- 
taken for him from a distance, Anti-Christ has all the 
beauty, all the cynical hatred of mankind, which listens to 
him in adoration that, after Luca has suggested it to us, 
we might expect. It is hardly necessary, one might say, 
for the devil to whisper to him ; in his heart all the cruelty 
and villainy of the universe have been sown and have come 



ORVIETO 97 

to flower. Opposite, the fresco of the Resurrection, with its 
huge naked angels sounding their death-destroying trumpets, 
decked with the banner of the Cross, ^crushes us beneath its 
tremendous imaginative power. In his magnificent mind 
the Resurrection took form, so that he was able, as it were, 
to comprehend it and its humanity, and to show it to us 
ere it had been resolved out of the confusion of the trumpets 
into the order of the syllables of God. Visions as splendid 
as those of Dante dawn upon him — the Punishment of the 
Wicked, the Reward of the Blessed, and Paradise. Perhaps 
Luca Signorelli alone of all great painters, not excepting the 
author of the Triumph of Death at Pisa, has, as it were, 
comprehended heaven and hell. I speak of him and his 
work elsewhere in this book, and it is to that critical estimate 
of his achievement that I must refer the reader. With his 
tremendous thoughts as our companions we walk the streets 
of Orvieto, ever finding it necessary to return again to the 
Cappella della Madonna di S. Brizio, where among the poets 
of Greece and Rome and Italy we see the tragedy of our 
world, the pathetic drama of the soul of man. 

In the Palazzo Soliano, a building of the thirteenth cen- 
tury, once the palace of the Popes, which stands to the 
south of the Duomo, we find Luca himself and a picture of 
S. Maria Maddalena, of no little interest ; and it is here, too, 
that we see that shrine by Ugolino, which he made to prove 
his ability to the people of Orvieto before they entrusted him 
with the casket of the Corporale. The city also is full of 
curiosities, such as Etruscan remains, and charms, and the well 
of St. Patrick, built by San Gallo in 1527 for Clement vii., 
who, after the sack of Rome, had come to Orvieto for safety. 
In order to insure the supply of water in case of siege, he 
had this strange well made. It is- like the Tower of Pisa, 
buried in the earth, save that there are two stairways, the 
one above the other. Looking down, one sees- the water 
G 



98 THE CITIES OF UMBRIA 

at the bottom like a perfect small jewel, across ^Yhose surface 
visions might well pass. 

But after all, it is not in such mere curiosities as these that 
the charm of Orvieto lies, but in her very self, isolated in 
that barren world on her precipitous rock. Reached as she 
now is from the railway by a funicular lift, the traveller 
little understands how difficult she is to approach. But he 
who comes to her from the valley by that road which winds 
for miles up the hill towards her, may even yet understand 
that she was ever a city of refuge. And was it not, perhaps, 
with that idea consuming her, that she desired at last the 
very Body of Christ, so that she might be indestructible and 
impregnable for ever? She is even yet the city of miracle 
and mystery, pale and languid with thoughts of death. It is 
not for nothing that she alone in our world has opened her 
gates to welcome the very Christ. The whole city having 
received Him with joy, seems to have passed into the 
cathedral with Him, and even yet to be hanging on His 
words and kissing His feet and hands, and waiting for Him 
to tell her some new great thing. And so the grass grows 
in the streets, and the people are few, and the fountains have 
ceased because there is no one to rejoice in their music ; and 
the very city herself, with finger on her lips, pale and imma- 
culate among the mountains, waits for the Voice as of many 
waters. 



X 
CITTA DELLA PIEVE 

TWENT from Orvieto to Citta della Pieve for the sake 
of Perugino, who was born there in 1446. I stayed 
there more than three days, which was all the time I had, 
for its own sake. It is a little city, some miles from the 
railway, set on a hill sixteen hundred feet above sea-level. 

The Peruginos which remain there are not the best works 
of the master. It would seem that for the most part 
they are the work of his pupils, or of his old age. But 
the city itself, with its views of the lakes of Trasimeno 
and Chiusi and the tawny valley, a veritable work by Piero 
della Francesca, southward towards Eome, the magnificent 
woods beneath it, the quiet peace of the place, are in them- 
selves more valuable than the mediocre work of the great 
painter who was born there ; for they remain for ever in the 
memory as a piece of the last forlorn beauty of mediaeval 
Italy. It is surely the sun that redeems modern Italy from 
a sort of vulgarity, or the suspicion of a kind of hideous 
squalor. He clothes her wdth an imperial beauty, so that 
we look into her eyes even now as into the eyes of a queen. 
Her faint and fading beauty seems to us worth everything 
else in the world because the sun shines upon her — the sun 
which is the smile of God. 

And so it is perhaps to the sun, who robes this little city, 
too, in a mantle of splendid colour all through the day, and 
at evening adorns her with bright fire, his fierce smouldering 

99 



100 THE CITIES OF UMBRIA 

jewels, and the radiance of his face, that we owe the curious 
fascination of a place so poor, so desolate, and so forlorn. 

The Oratory of S. Maria de' Bianchi holds the most con- 
siderable work attributed to Perugino that the little city 
can boast. It is an Adoration of the Magi in the well- 
known manner of the great Umbrian. Under a lofty shed, 
uplifted by four graceful pillars, Madonna sits with the 
Divine Child in her lap, while the three kings stand or 
kneel before Him. An immense number of figures moves 
across the picture. And the background is just one of the 
exquisite Umbrian spaces fulfilled with light air and delicate 
hill, and a faint gesture of the mountains in tbe distance. 
Fantastic trees, through whose branches filters that limpid 
clear air, spring here and there from the nearer hills. A 
few delicate, wing-shaped clouds float lightly, magically, 
in the soft sky, from which an angel plunges, hinting, as it 
were, at benediction. And over all lies the profound peace 
of yesterday, the immaculate morning of the old world. 
Many and many a time has Perugino painted a scene like 
this, and almost always with the same secret understanding 
of space. He seems to say to us, 'Lift up your, hearts,' and 
to have already anticipated the answer. 

There are other pictures by Perugino, or his pupils, in the 
city, which it does not seem worth while to describe, because 
no description of a picture, however careful, however tactful, 
can really create in a reader's mind the very thing itself. 
And if you will not come to Citta della Pieve, these pictures 
are not of so much importance that it will grieve you to 
miss them altogether ; and if you come, why, you need no 
description from me. 

But it is Citta della Pieve itself that I would have you 
love, finding in her gates, Porta S. Agostino and Porta 
S. Francesco, a real and homely beauty. Her brows are 
bound with fading leaves, yellow and red, in the autumn of 



CITTA DELLA PIEVE 101 

her life ; it is only the sun who is still faithful to her in his 
profound impartiality towards good or evil, old or young ; 
and he, looking into her face, finds her still beautiful with 
the adoration that he compels from the meanest and the 
simplest. 

It is but six and twenty miles from Citta della Pieve 
to Perugia, through the valley and over the low hills ; and 
returning by this route to the capital of Umbria, it is possible 
to see the beautiful picture of Perugino at Panicale, in the 
Church of S. Sebastiano, of the martyrdom of that saint. 
It is worth some trouble to see. At Chiusi, northwards from 
Citta, there are innumerable Etruscan remains; but I did 
not go there, both because the weather was bad and because 
I wished "to visit the Etruscan cities with some sort of plan ; 
it was too hot to venture into the Maremma. And it seemed 
to me better to see Chiusi with those strange cities of death, 
than with the more mediaeval towns to which I had con- 
fined myself. It was for this reason that I avoided Viterbo, 
wishing to see it rather from Rome. The traveller, however, 
who is not likely to come this way again should see every- 
thing he possibly can, and not put ofi' visiting a city for any 
reason whatsoever unless he be indifferent to it. 



XI 

GUBBIO, FABRIANO, CAGLI, AND THE 
FURLO PASS 

IT was one morning of early summer that I set out from 
Perugia by the Porta Augusta for Gubbio, across the 
mountains. The way was musical with streams, for there 
had been rain in the night, and the world was beautiful. 
Downhill into the valley of the Tiber I went, past the olives 
and the willows, whose leaves were dancing gravely in the 
wind, watching their own beauty in the shallows of the great 
river. Then, gradually, after I had crossed the Tiber, I came 
into a desolate land of mountains and bare hillsides, utterly 
forlorn and without the fellowship of trees or flowers. The 
wind was dismal and lonely, wandering over the moorland 
as though in search of companions. Now and again a shep- 
herd clad in goatskins towered in silhouette against the 
furthest sky — a mxagnificent figure, simple and antique, 
keeping the world sweet ; and sometimes a little group of 
trees, scarcely sufficient for a copse, whispered together as 
though in fear of the indestructible silence. Far and far 
away, the beautiful valleys of Umbria led me down innumer- 
able vistas towards many a splendid city, famous and 
deserted, full even yet of lovely things — the profound, 
material dreams of the great artists, or the lives of the 
saints. And all day over all the splendour and the ruin, the 
uplifted Apennines towered in the sunlight, their brows white 
with snow that the sun transformed into a passionate glory. 

102 




S. GIOVANNI BATTISTA, GUBBIO 



GUBBIO, FABEIANO, AND THE FURLO PASS 103 

Towards evening I came to a valley, and crossing it in the ' 
magical evening light, solemn and grave and quiet with a 
kind of immaculate peace, I entered ^Gubhio at sunset. 

Gubbio is the dream of some mediaeval miniaturist. Built 
on the lower slopes of Monte Calvo, the little city, now too 
small for its great old walls, rises in terraces one above 
another, where the cypresses behind and among the palaces 
and churches point their joined hands ever upwards in that 
long life which is an everlasting prayer. Behind the city 
Monte Calvo, arid and tawny, lifts its head into the soft sky 
and seems to cry to innumerable hills and valleys, and to the 
great, indiflferent mountains, Eepent ! Repent ! Repent ! 
Over the city, crowning it so perfectly that it surely cannot 
have been placed there by chance, the beautiful Gothic 
Palazzo dei Consoli, forlorn and deserted, arises in ruin 
from some dream of the Middle Age. And indeed in that 
old time Gubbio was full of dreams. So old that it is 
impossible to decide the date of its foundation, or to account 
for its curious religions, it still possesses the remains of a 
Roman theatre in the immensity of that plain which has 
consumed so great a part of the old city. Utterly destroyed 
by Totila, it was again besieged in 1155 by Barbarossa when 
he had done with Spoleto. And it was then that its famous 
Bishop, S. Ubaldo, saved it from the hands of that strange 
and terrible General, who indeed was threatening to consume 
even the Papacy in his insatiable desire for Empire. In 
1364, the people of Gubbio invited the Counts of Montefeltro, 
who had established their lordship over the town of Urbino, 
which ever after gave them their title, receiving investiture 
of it from the Popes in the thirteenth century, to expel 
from the city the tyrants Gabrielli. It was Antonio, Count 
of Montefeltro and of Urbino, who was called upon, not only 
by the people of Gubbio but by those of Cagli also, from 
which city he expelled the Ceccardi. Less than a hundred 



104 THE CITIES OF UMBRIA 

years later we read of the magnificent welcome the city gave 
to Borso, Marquis of Ferrara, who in March 1471, on his way 
to Rome, spent four days at Gubbio and Urbino, with an 
escort of 500 horsemen, 100 foot, and 150 mules. 

' He was met at the frontier by the Count,' says Dennis- 
toun, 'accompanied by the Lords of Faenza, Rimini, and 
Pesaro, with a noble following, and conducted to the palace 
of Gubbio, Federigo and his nephew, Ottaviano della Carda, 
leading the palfrey of this proud parvenu.' 

That palace of Gubbio, the Palazzo Ducale, is now, alas, a 
ruin. It stands close to the cathedral, splendid even in its 
decay — only the courtyard remains to remind us how beauti- 
ful it once was. Built perhaps by Francesco ' di Giorgio, 
perhaps by Baccio Pontelli, or again by Luciano Laurano, 
the architect of the palace at Urbino, it is described by 
Sanzi as ' facing south-east and flanked by mountains on the 
north, overlooking fertile valleys and smiling champaigns, 
and excelling the attractions of Urbino in charming prospects 
and pleasant pathways. ' The initials of the two Montef eltrian 
Dukes Federigo and Guidobaldo appear in the decoration, 
and even the oak of the Della Rovere family, which might 
seem to suggest restoration, at the least, at a later date. 

'Differing much,' says Signor Luigi Bonfatti, 'from the 
architecture at Urbino, its courtyard is very fine, of the 
mixed or composite style usual in that age. The windows, 
doors, and chimneys have stone lintels, exquisitely chiselled 
in low relief with masterly arabesque designs, those in the 
interior being touched with gold. The ceilings, now partially 
decayed, are all of wood in half-relief compartments with 
heavy cornices, and roses coloured and gilded. The palace 
was completed by Duke Guidobaldo, who commissioned the 
cabinet or closet of superb intarsia, thirteen by six and a half 
feet. This tiny room is nineteen feet high, but the inlaid 
work goes only half-way up. It is of the finest patterns and 



GUBBIO, FABRIANO, AND THE FURLO PASS 105 

workmanship, including several emblematic representations 
of music, literature, physical science, geography, and war. 
On the cornice is an inscription now in part illegible.'^ 

When in 1518 the Dukedom of Urbino passed to Catherine 
de' Medici, then a child, and the Pope unceremoniously 
seized, almost like a highwayman, the territory of the 
Rovere, Gubbio, ' which had shown itself less devoted ' to the 
interests of that family than Urbino fidelissimo, was made the 
capital of the Duchy. The Delia Eovere, however, got back 
their own ; Francesca Maria was restored, and Urbino once 
more became one of the most glorious cities of the Renais- 
sance. But the Papacy still desired to possess a province so 
near to Rome, so splendid and so famous. And at length, 
the last Delia Rovere, frightened by disease and priests and 
mountebanks, bequeathed to the Popes what they had so 
often tried to obtain by fraud. It is perhaps one of the 
most tragical histories of the world ; that story of a strong 
and powerful race falling at last into the hands of priests 
and dreamers, and yielding very willingly at last, and almost 
\Wth a sigh of relief, what its ancestors had lived and died 
to save.. Thus Gubbio in 1631 came under the rule of 
Rome. 

Gubbio, however, whose life would seem to have been so 
eventful in worldly affairs, is by no means insignificant in the 
history of Umbrian art. Oderigi da Gubbio, that contem- 
porary of Giotto to whom Dante speaks in Purgatory, was 
the forerunner, it may well be, of that Umbrian school, so 
delightfully pictorial, so unreal in its criticism of life. ' 0, 
diss' io lui, non se' tu Oderisi,' says Dante : 

* Art not thou Oderis,' I cried, 

' Of Gubbio, and that school the pride 



^ See also the Memoirs oj the Dukes of Urbino^ by James Dennis- 
toun of Dennistoun, 1851, vol. i. p. 164. 



106 THE CITIES OF UMBEIA 

Which they of Paris all 
The limner's mystery call ? ' 
' Brother, more bright the pages shine, 
Bologna's Franco did design : 
Now his is all the fame 
'Less I some part may claim. 

So Cimabue deemed the field 

Of painting his, but now doth yield 

To Giotto his renown, 

And all obscure hath grown.' ^ 

This legendary painter — for no work of his is actually 
known to exist — was placed in Purgatory by Dante, it would 
seem, on account of his pride and zeal in his art. The son 
of a certain Guido of Gubbio, in 1268 he went to Bologna, 
and Dennistoun suggests that he founded a school there, on 
what authority I do not know. Certainly he painted there, 
' in fifteen days, no less than eighty-two miniatures, in good 
azure blue, in an antiphonary, for which he was paid thirty 
Bolognese soldi.' Vasari says that he met Giotto in Rome ; 
however that may be, his pupil Guido Palmerucci, born about 
1280, whose work may be found up and down Gubbio, more 
or less ruined — in S. Maria dei Laici, in the Palazzo Com- 
munale — was the master of Martino Nelli, whose son 
Ottaviano was the greatest of the Gubbian painters. I speak 
of Ottaviano Nelli elsewhere ; his works are not rare in 
Umbria, nor are they without that decorative value for us 
which, after all, is the chief delight of all primitive painting. 

Martino Nelli, the father of Ottaviano, has left certain 
fragments of frescoes in Gubbio, which are his rather by 
tradition than by any direct evidence we possess. But 
Ottaviano may be seen in all his country splendour in 
S. Maria Nuova, where he has painted over the first altar in 
the south aisle Madonna with the Divine Child in her lap. 
^ Shadwell's Dante, Purgatory, xi. 79. 




VIA DELLE OCCHI, GUBBIO 



GUBBIO, FABRIANO, AND THE FUELO PASS 107 

The Child lifts His hand in blessing the wife of S. Pietro, 
as it is said, and the Donor presented by St. Antony, while 
He listens to an angel playing on a kind of violin. God 
the Father, surrounded by angels and cherubs, is in the act 
to crown Madonna, who gazes out of the picture with some- 
thing of that indifference which we expect from Ottaviano. 
Behind her, angels lift a kind of canopy or curtain. 

It is, as I think, in such a picture as this that we find the 
fading influence of a man evidently so great in his time as 
Oderigi. The whole picture is a huge miniature Avith much 
of the gaiety of colour to be found in those delightful works 
that enliven certain pages or corners of the great dull service- 
books. It is difficult to believe that, for these early painters, 
Art was more than 'an accidental play of sunlight and 
shadow for a few moments on the wall or floor ' ; that their 
naive works scattered up and down Italy in the churches 
and museums are anything but such a space of fallen light, 
entirely pleasant if we are content to consider it as such, 
rather than as an attempt to realise life. No more than the 
Japanese did these early men grapple with life ; their work is 
for the most part designed to carry out the decoration of a 
church, to symbolise a certain religious truth, rather than 
to bring it down to the level of everyday experience. It 
might seem that as soon as doubts of these religious truths 
began to disturb the minds of men they sought with great 
earnestness to realise them, succeeding only in proving them 
the more improbable. To a Fra Angelico heaven was of 
more value than the whole world ; all that was lovely in the 
earth or the sky he, nothing doubting, laid up in heaven. 
But the great painters, Signorelli, Michelangelo, Raphael, 
and Lionardo, when they deal with a religious subject, either 
realise it for us so that we think of it no longer as super- 
natural but as a kind of fairy tale, or else as in Raphael's 
Madonnas content themselves a little sentimentally with the 



108 THE CITIES OF UMBRIA 

divinity of all Motherhood. As decoration, their work is 
to my mind inferior to the sestheticism of the early men 
which was content with symbols. The Sistine Chapel fails 
as a chapel, it is a magnificent picture-gallery. Those languid 
or passionate figures thrust themselves upon us with terri- 
fying insistence. Man is so omnipotent there that there is 
no room for God. But in the Upper Church at Assisi, or, 
better still, in that great golden Church of S. Marco at 
Venice, which is simply a vast mosaic, man is dwarfed 
beside the beautiful symbols of God, the expression of the 
Faith, the importance of just that, expressed with a pro- 
found understanding of decoration as such, so that God 
might have at the least a House Beautiful. 

Among the pupils of Ottaviano at Gubbio may be men- 
tioned Domenico di Cecchi, Bernardino di Hanni, and 
Giacomo Bedi, whose works in S. Agostino are still fair and 
fresh upon the old walls. 

It is in the Palazzo Municipale are preserved the famous 
Eugubian Tables found in 1444 in a ruined temple of 
Jupiter at Scheggia, near to Gubbio. Those tables, so old 
that it is possible they date from B.C. 200, are really the 
most interesting things in Gubbio. They contain possibly 
the rules of a College of Priests — the Fratres Atredii, as it is 
said — and are written in Etruscan and in Latin characters. 
The language is, however, Umbrian. M. Michel Breal in Les 
Tables EuguUnes has made an interesting study of them. 

In the same building we find the small collection of pictures 
that the city has brought together. Apart from the Umbrian 
pictures, which are of interest chiefly to the student, there is 
but one picture of real beauty and importance — a Madonna 
and Child, by Fra Lippo Lippi of Florence. An example of 
the famous Gubbio ware of the sixteenth century glows like 
a great ruby in a cabinet in the gallery. 

But it is not in such a museum as this that the mere 



GUBBIO, FABRIANO, AND THE FURLO PASS 109 

traveller will delight but in Gubbio itself, its picturesque 
old streets, and perhaps in its churches and fields ; for Gubbio 
is a garden. 

The Church of S. Agostino stands just outside the city 
by the Porta Eomana. It is in the choir of this church that 
Ottaviano Nelli himself, perhaps, and certainly his pupils, 
have painted the story of St. Augustine's life. It is useless 
to recount again a life so well known as that of St. Augustine. 
Even the headstrong Protestant will recognise the various 
scenes in the life of one to whom he has appealed so 
vehemently. In S. Maria Piaggiola, close to the Porta 
Vittoria, you may also find a ruined picture of Madonna ; 
and as in that picture by him in S. Maria Nuova, we feel 
that this man, whose work at Foligno one critic at least has 
found little better than 'a marsh growth,' had a real under- 
standing of the convention that Art must ever admit. 

I missed the great Festa and Procession of the Ceri, which 
happens on the 15th of May. Mr. H. M. Bower in a book 
called The Elevation and Procession of the Ceri at Guhbio, has 
written very charmingly of this most ancient feast. The 
figures of S. Ubaldo, S. Giorgio, and S. Antonio on great 
pedestals, each lifted by more than fortj?- men, are rushed 
through the little city. It is a festa of renown. All Umbria 
goes to see it and rejoice. Whether it be a remembrance of 
the benign reign of Ceres or a feast of Ceri — Tapers, — or, 
as Mr. Bower seems to suggest, a feast of the god Cerfus, 
whoever he may have been, I know not. 

There are two ways of coming to Urbino from Gubbio. 
The one follows the railway to Fabriano and then proceeds 
slowly towards Urbino, which it reaches in some four or five 
hours by Sassoferrato and Cagli. The other crosses the 
mountains, passing through Scheggia or Cagli, and at last 
climbs over the great Furlo Pass, perhaps the wildest pass of 



110 THE CITIES OF UMBRIA 

the Apennines, reaching Urbino after one of the most splendid 
day's travel to be found in the world. The traveller who, 
wisely I think, decides to go by road may easily visit Fabriano 
by rail from Gubbio, returning if he like only so far as 
Fossato, whence he may set out by road on the next morn- 
ing. There is but little to be seen at Fabriano, and nothing 
at all at Fossato. Famous as the birthplace of the painter 
Gentile da Fabriano, the town is to-day devoted to the 
manufacture of paper, as it has been for centuries. Allegretto 
Nuzi, her first painter, seems to have left a few panels up 
and down the Marches, notably at Macerata. His rich and 
sentimental work would seem to point to Sienese influence 
rather than to Florentine, but he appears in the register of 
painters at Florence in 1346. His earliest work may be 
found in the Vatican in the Museo Cristiano. It is an altar- 
piece, not very large, of Madonna and Child, with many 
saints and angels, signed and dated 1315. It seems probable 
that he was strongly influenced by the school of Gubbio, 
that indeed such Florentine work as he had seen was soon 
forgotten for the gay splendour of that school. His work at 
Macerata certainly reminds one of Simone Martini, with 
something of that painter's delight in beauty for its own 
sake, though falling short by how much of any such per- 
fection. His pupil Gentile di Niccol6 di Giovanni Massi, 
called Gentile da Fabriano, I speak of elsewhere; there is 
but little of his work in Fabriano to-day. Born there, in or 
about 1370, he studied at Gubbio, and probably soon set 
out for Florence. But as may be seen there to-day, or at 
Perugia, Orvieto, or Milan, he kept the dreamy divinity of 
his work safe from the more splendid naturalism of the 
Florentine school. And yet in comparing him with Fra 
Angelico how delightfully human he seems ; for Fra Angelico 
was a mystic, pure and simple, while Gentile was a poet who 
had loved God. There is no work of importance by him in 




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GUBBIO, FABRIANO, AND THE FURLO PASS 111 

Fabriano, but in S. Lucia and in the Pinacoteca we may see 
the work of his pupils, Francesco and Antonio di Gentile — 
poor painters both of them, and scarcely worth our time. 

The traveller who desires to reach Urbino quickly will go 
direct from Fabriano by train in just over three hours. But 
the way by road is so fine that I think, indeed, he is but a 
sorry adventurer who should prefer the desecrating rail. 
For myself I returned to Gubbio, where the inn is poor but 
clean and comfortable, and the host entirely at your service. 

I set out as early as five o'clock one golden morning in the 
middle of July. Gubbio was a little languid after the festa. 
The steep, narrow streets seemed quieter and graver than 
ever before, and the whole country more like a deep garden, 
silent and almost conventual under the soft, inefiable sky. It 
is a way slow but beautiful that you follow, at first through 
a great ravine, where a noisy stream splashes over the 
strange red rocks. The world here seems never to have 
awakened, the barren hills to have escaped the creating 
gesture of God. Soon I came to Scheggia, and took the 
highway of the Roman armies. Via Flaminia. It was from 
here I first saw the great summits of the Furlo, white and 
immaculate, like great angels standing in the sunlight, their 
feet on the iron of the world. Presently I came into a sort 
of vale full of trees — oaks and chestnuts, and by noon I was 
in Cagli, where I slept. Rising about four o'clock in the 
afternoon I set out to see Cagli, which appears to be devoted 
to tannery. It was for Raphael's sake that I stayed at Cagli, 
for Giovanni Sanzio, his father, has more than one fine 
painting there. I came upon one of them in the church of 
S. Domenico, in the second chapel on the left. The whole 
alcove, for it is little more, is painted in fresco by Giovanni, 
Madonna with her Son and many angels, together with St. 
John Baptist and St. Dominic, St. Peter and St. Francis. 
While over it, in a kind of lunette, he has painted a great 



112 THE CITIES OF UMBRIA 

landscape with the Resurrection in the foreground. From 
the roof God the Father, surrounded by many musical 
angels, blesses us. 

This great man — for he seems to have been something more 
than a great painter, so near to the splendid court of Urbino 
— came under the influence of the three great men among his 
contemporaries, Piero della Francesca, Melozzo da Forli, 
Luca Signorelli. He is said to have invited Piero della 
Francesca to Urbino in 1469, and to have entertained him as 
a guest in his own house. At that time Urbino was at the 
height of its splendour, full of learned men from all Italy ; 
the delight of artists as much for the treasures that the dukes 
had collected there as for the civility of the court. And 
Giovanni Sanzio, at that time probably the leading painter at 
court, was in a position to offer hospitality to Piero della 
Francesca; he appears to have done so very willingly. It 
was, however, Piero's pupil, Melozzo da Forli, who v/ould 
appear to have influenced Giovanni most strongly. The great 
painter of the Resurrection at Borgo San Sepolcro, of the 
frescoes now destroyed at Loretto, of the story of the Cross 
at Arezzo, found in Melozzo da Forli, it would seem, a kind 
of St. Paul ; and it was through him, as I think, that Piero's 
ideas were circulated through the schools rather than by 
Piero himself ; and it was of Melozzo rather than of Piero, 
though he speaks of him also, that Giovanni tells us in his 
Cronaca, written in verse, now in the Vatican. Simple and 
grave, his gentleness, his nobility, are what we should wish 
for in the father of the most serene and perfect of all 
painters. That he was known to Mantegna, we are assured 
partly by his work and partly by his Cronaca. He visited 
Milan. It seems not unlikely that since the influence of 
Mantegna would appear to be by no means small in the 
Umbrian school, especially in such painters as Piero della 
Francesca and Fiorenzo di Lorenzo, it was through 



GUBBIO, FABEIANO, AND THE FUELO PASS 113 

Giovanni Sanzio that the great northerner first penetrated 
into mystical Italy. 

Close to his frescoes in a chapel 'of the Tiranni family 
in S. Domenico, we find a Pieta with S. Jerome and S. 
Buonaventura. We shall meet this great man again in 
Urbinoj but it is not there, but here, in the church of S. 
Domenico, that we find him at his greatest. The serene sun- 
light that was Eaphael seems already to have touched him 
here where he stands, in the dawn of that perfect day ; and, 
indeed, as it is said, the young Eaphael himself, a boy of 
nine years old, lives as the angel to the right of the Blessed 
Virgin. 

It was still very early in the morning of the next day 
when I set out from Cagli. Before me the Furlo lifted its 
white brows for the sun to kiss in the dawn I could not see. 
It was not long before I was in the midst of that fantastic 
fairyland, with its strange, horrid cliff's, its threatening 
crags, its changing lights, and tremendous gateways. On 
any day but that it must have inspired me with a kind of 
terror, but the sun was so golden, the sky so serene, that I 
felt nothing but the mysterious beauty of a scene so fantas- 
tical. I was, as it were, on the roof of mystical Italy, 
which lay beneath me like the great sunny nave of a 
Eomanesque church — the high altar was at Siena, the south 
transept ended in the silence of Orvieto, the north in the 
holy city of Assisi, and the great west door where all the 
nations waited to enter was Eome. As I went upward, 
higher and higher, with the roar of a mighty torrent in my 
ears, I seemed to hear the deep breathing of the great organ 
that was soon to fill that church with some splendid chant. 
And suddenly it came to me in a kind of profound breadth 
and depth and simplicity, as of some ancient mighty tone of 
the plainsong. A great land of oats and. cornfields, with 
grave uplifted hills, green and perfect and beautiful with the 
H 



114 THE CITIES OF UMBRIA 

wild rose. Many waters swept by me with their song, and 
in unending suavity those great uplands carried the chant to 
heaven with the G-loria of the Sun. It was like the evening 
canticle of the world, splendid with the beauty of the flowers. 
Ah ! shall I ever again hear that grave and perfect chant ? 
shall I ever on some fortunate day find again that profound, 
monotonous music over the hum of the world *? All that we 
have suffered and dared to hope, all our helpless love and 
despair, are expressed in the sorrowful and noble music that 
surprises us in those lonely, forlorn mountains. 



XII 
UEBINO 

IT was evening when I came suddenly, almost at a turning 
of the way, upon that once splendid city of Urbino. It 
was as though I beheld the havoc of heaven. Time, like a 
proud and terrible angel with his legions, had laid her low. 
In a kind of towering ruin she seemed to lie before me await- 
ing with strained, despairing eyes the benediction of evening. 
Far away to the west I knew Siena pointed her white hands 
to the sky, while southward and west Orvieto knelt upon her 
barren hills, beautiful because of the blood of Christ. And 
lowly in the valley of the Tiber, towards the Eternal City 
where the Church awaits even to-day so patiently her 
victory or deliverance, Assisi crouched beneath Subasio, a 
little brown city vowed to God. Is it strange, think you, 
that amid all this patient faith, this curious unconsciousness 
of material things, a kind of ecstatic dream of the Kingdom 
of Heaven, Urbino should stand upon her hill, still in the 
attitude of attention and service, like a great Caryatid from 
whose immortal shoulders some temple has fallen awayl 
Between Urbino and those mystical cities of Umbria, one by 
one out of the night the great angels of the Apennines 
appear, on whose shoulders Heaven rests, on whose foreheads 
gleam imperishable stars. You will not find Urbino full of 
joy, as Florence or Siena are ; it might seem that within her 
walls it is necessary to remember death every hour of the 
day. Have not her kings, even in the splendid years, deserted 

115 



116 THE CITIES OF UMBEIA 

her for a cell, being in love with death before their angel 
came 1 Yet on her hills uptossed, like great white breakers 
almost, against the cliffs of the Apennines, she is even to-day 
a kind of miracle. It is true she possesses pictures of some 
importance, churches of a certain forlorn beauty, a ruined 
palace, a broken heart ; but what are these to us who pass 
by '? She is a dead city, that I have loved. 



Far out of the tourist's path, till 1898 Urbino could only 
be reached after a long journey by diligence. Since then, 
however, a small line of railway has made it .more easily 
accessible from Fabriano. But even now what was one of the 
most splendid cities of the Renaissance, that gave birth to 
Eaphael and harboured Piero della Francesca and Luca 
Signorelli, whose court was the most refined in Italy, serv- 
ing as a pattern for the Corfegiano of the Count Baldassare 
Castiglione, is without a decent inn. Lying there on the 
hills, still beautiful and proud, Urbino seems to bear a kind 
of pathetic witness to the power of mortality, against which 
neither brass nor stone may endure. 

That Count Baldassare, sent by Duke Guidobaldo to the 
court of King Henry vii. of England, who made him a knight, 
is perhaps our best witness to the splendour of the city and 
the exquisite refinement of the court of Urbino. Castiglione 
came to England as proxy for Duke Guidobaldo at his instal- 
lation as a Knight of the Garter in 1503. It is said that on 
his return 'his conversation of all that he had seen in a 
country so imperfectly known as England was greatly relished 
by the Duke, and his anecdotes of its court, its wealth, and 
its wonders long continued to enliven the palace circle of 
Montefeltro.' What Count Baldassare saw must indeed have 
surprised him, 'the choicest spirit' of Duke Guidobaldo's 
'elegant court.' In 1611, more than a hundred years later, 



URBINO 117 

an English traveller, on his return, writes as follows of the 
manners of Italy in comparison with those of England : — 

'I observed,' says this traveller,^ *a custom, in all those 
Italian cities and towns through which I passed, that is not 
used in any other country that I saw in my travels ; neither 
do I think that any other nation of Christendom doth use it, 
but only Italy. The Italian, and also most strangers that are 
commorant in Italy, do always at their meals use a little fork 
when they cut their meat. For while with their knife, which 
they hold in one hand, they cut out the meat of the dish, they 
fasten their fork, which they hold in their other hand, upon 
the same dish, so that whatsoever he be that sitting in the 
company of any other at meat should unadvisedly touch the 
dish of meat with his fingers from which all at the table do 
cut, he will give occasion of offence unto the company as 
having transgressed the laws of good manners in so much 
that for his error he shall be at the least brow-beaten if not 
reprehended in words. . . . The reason of this their curiosity 
is, because the Italian cannot by any means endure to have his 
dish touched with fingers, seeing all men's fingers are not 
alike clean.' 

And indeed it is so we must ever think of Italy, the first- 
born of the modern world. That civilisation, as we might 
say, that ritual of life — life itself being, as some of those great 
men of the Renaissance were not slow to observe, a kind of 
religious service — was very punctually and strictly observed 
at Urbino in the sixteenth century. There on the hills under 
the imperishable Apennine the Renaissance, in all its liberty 
and beauty and splendour, was played out — yes, almost like 
a play. The most refined and learned of all tlie courts of 
Italy, it was there all the wit and genius of the Latin race, 
about to lead the world towards its emancipation, gathered 
from time to time. Surrounded by the finest scholars and 
1 Coryat's Crudities, ed. 1776, vol. i. p. 106. 



118 THE CITIES OF UMBRIA 

the noblest gentlemen of Italy, Duke Guidobaldo lived a 
life that reads almost like a fairy tale, till suddenly that 
pestilence which was Cesare Borgia fell upon him and his 
country, and he fled to Mantua. 

And in truth Urbino to-day, in the tragic sunset of a 
summer dsij, looks as though Cesare Borgia had but just 
passed by. 

It was with Count Guido Montefeltro in the middle of the 
thirteenth century that the family, so illustrious in the history 
of Umbria and Italy, first comes to our notice. A Ghibelline, 
he went to Pisa with the rest from Tuscany and .Romagna to 
greet the young Conradino who had come into Italy to dis- 
pute the crown of Naples with Charles of Anjou. Later, he 
appears again as captain-general of the Ghibellines, forcing 
all Romagna to be subject to him. Forli was the capital of 
his conquest, and it was there he endured a siege by Giovanni 
di Appia, general to Pope Martin iv., extricating himself by 
one of those stratagems which, as Villani says, ' established 
his reputation as a sagacious man, more cunning than any 
Italian of his time, masterly alike in war and diplomacy.' 
However, Forli was eventually surrendered, and Guido made 
his peace with the Pope. Not for long ; as general of the 
Pisans against the Guelphs of Florence and Lucca, he was 
again censured by the Pope; and in 1295 we find him again 
in the dust and again forgiven. Meantime the Franciscan 
enthusiasm, almost a religion in itself, swept over Italy. 
Thousands forsook all and embraced a life of poverty and 
devotion. Among them was Count Guido. From the dreams 
of St. Francis he had learned a kind of introspection, so that 
he came at last to doubt the sufficiency of the Pope's pardon. 
Throwing away his county and his coronet, breaking his 
sword, which had never been rendered to his enemy, he went 
to Assisi, and, putting on the coarse habit of the Franciscans, 



URBINO 119 

sought forgiveness of God and peace for his own soul in the 
tiny cells of what had suddenly become a holy city. Pope 
Celestin, utterly unfitted for the crown of gold and iron and 
thorns which the Popes wore so resolutely, so uneasily 
during those restless years, soon abdicated, making way for 
Boniface viii. The new Pope, however, was soon at war with 
the Colonna, that mighty family which all through the Middle 
Age was alternately expelled from and returning to Eome. 
A general was a necessity. Remembering the experience 
and the victories of Count Guido, he sent for him, ' silencing 
his religious scruples by a preliminary absolution for the sin 
of reverting to worldly schemes.' Count Guido, that strange 
monk of Montefeltro, but lately the most 'cunning and 
sagacious ' general in Italy, counselled * deceitful promises as 
the surest means of conquest.' So we find him in the 
Ghibelline Dante's Inferno a miserable soul without hope, to 
whom the whole of the twenty-seventh canto of the Inferno 
is devoted. Count Guido died in 1298, on September 29th, 
and is generally supposed to have been buried at Assisi. 
Thus the great family of Montefeltro dawned on Italy — a 
race of soldiers and leaders of men who, from their eyrie in 
the Apennines, swooped down on Italy at the head of in- 
numerable legions, Florentine, Pisan, or Papal, as the case 
might be. 

The next century seems to have been devoted by the 
House of Montefeltro to fighting their neighbours the Bran- 
caleoni, the Malatesta, and the Ceccardi. Eventually Urbino 
would appear to have expelled the family; but in 1376 it 
was recalled in the person of Antonio, the great-grandson of 
Guido il Vecchio. It was he who, 'emancipating himself 
from the spell that had bound his race to a falling cause, gave 
to his posterity an example of loyalty to his overlord the 
Pope.' He appears to have been a somewhat liberal ruler, 
bent on reform, which may well be since he was. a returned 



120 THE CITIES OF UMBRIA 

exile. At any rate, both Cagli and Gubbio welcomed his 
rule, and after a struggle of nearly ten years he won 
Cantiano from the Gabrielli. He died in 1404. He had 
three children — Guidantonio, who succeeded him, Anna, and 
Battista. 

It was Guidantonio who in 1420 received the Golden 
Rose from the Pope, becoming later captain-general of the 
Florentines in their war against Lucca. Apparently through 
no fault of his own he was defeated. Eight years later, in 
1438, he lost his second wife, whom he dearly loved, and from 
this blow he never recovered. He retired to Loretto, perhaps 
with the same malady at his heart as that which had sent 
Guido, his ancestor, to Assisi. Loretto was considered one 
of the holiest places in Italy, as possessing the Santa Casa. 
It was there later that Domenico Veneziano and Piero 
della Francesca were to paint their frescoes, so soon to be 
destroyed. It was during his retirement at Loretto, while 
Federigo, his natural son, ruled as vicegerent in Urbino, 
that Guidantonio founded the Duomo and the Church of San 
Donato (1439). In 1442 he died, and was buried in the 
church he had so lately founded and dedicated to San 
Donato. His ' cowled efhgy ' may still be seen there, the 
spurs he wore as a great knight hanging from the sword-hilt, 
the splendid blade sheathed for ever. His son Oddantonio, 
born in 1427, succeeded him at fifteen years of age. The 
terrible story of this prince reads like some dreadful fiction. 
His reign began well, for Pope Eugenius iv. gave him the 
title of Duke ; he was the first of his race to bear it. But he 
would seem to have been of a weak and vacillating nature, 
suffering any and every sort of influence to master him. 
Coming under the spell of that strange and fascinating per- 
sonality, Sigismondo Malatesta, Lord of Rimini, he was little 
better than wax in his hands. Sigismondo was one of the 
strangest figures in all the years of the Renaissance. A man of 



URBINO 121 

immense cultiare, exquisite taste, and profound understand- 
ing of beauty, he was at the same time a great patron of art, 
a great lover, and one of the most astonishing criminals in 
history. The patron of Piero della Francesca, who painted 
his portrait, and Leon Battista Alberti, who designed and 
built his great pagan temple out of the old Church of San 
Francesco, he was capable of a real passion for philosophy, for 
Greek art, for learning, and was guilty of the most terrible 
vices. He murdered certainly two of his wives, probably 
three ; his children were all illegitimate ; he was crafty, he 
was cruel, but he was not a barbarian. He entertained at his 
court Porcellio, Basinio, Trebanio, the poets ; Yalturio, the 
finest engineer in Italy. Pisanello, the great medallist, struck 
medallions for him, even as Piero and Alberti painted and 
built for him. He passionately loved his mistress, the divine 
Isotta, for whose sake he seems to have committed certain of 
his crimes. His noble qualities, which might well be imitated 
by any modern prince, have been overwhelmed by his vices 
and his crimes. Cunning and boastful he was in his youth, 
as later too, and a soldier of fortune. His ambition, very noble 
at times, as when with enthusiasm and tears he brought back 
from the sacred soil of Greece the bones of the great Platonist 
Gemisthus Pletho, was eaten away by selfishness, his splendid 
intellect hampered by conceit, his love spoiled by lust. 
Thus from the enthusiasm and joy of his youth he came to 
no serene old age, but to a brutal cynicism which his pro- 
foundly aesthetic temperament and mind were unable to 
-combat. So on his tomb, the pagan temple of San Francesco, 
where upon every arch and string-course, in every piece of 
sculptured work, appear the elephant and the rose, his emblems 
and his insolent and yet splendid legend, there may also be 
found the boast of his murders and the brutal pathetic jest : — 

' Porto le corna ch' ogn' uno le vede 
E tal le porte che non se lo crede.' • 



122 THE CITIES OF UMBRIA 

It was this man who brought about the fall of the wea.k 
and foolish Duke of Urbino, Oddantonio, whose city he 
desired. He sent two young men of vicious habits, Manfredi 
Pio da Carpi and Tomaso Agnello da Eimini, to Urbino, 
who succeeded easily in debasing his mind and morals, 
making of the prince who promised so well a mere 
devil. At last, at the instigation of Serafius, a physician, 
whose beautiful wife had been seduced by Manfredi, the 
revolution that Sigismondo so desired was awakened, and 
Oddantonio together with Manfredi and Tomaso was 
murdered. Dennistoun quotes from an old chronicle in the 
Oliveriana library an account of what followed : ' On 22nd 
July 1444, at lauds [about 3 a.m.], Oddantonio was slain in 
his own hall, and his familiar servants Manfredi de Pii and 
Tomaso de Rimini along with him ; and forthwith the people 
of Urbino in one voice called for Signor Federigo, who at 
once took possession of the state.' 

Federigo was the natural son of Guidantonio ' by a maiden 
of Urbino.' The Pope, on 22nd December 1424, formally 
made him legitimate when he was yet but two years old. 
While he was still young Federigo, who was destined to 
attain to so much splendour, was sent as a kind of hostage to 
Venice. It was while in that city that he came under the 
influence of Vittorino de Ramboldoni da Feltre, the learned 
professor of Mantua. This great man was a Greek scholar 
of no mean attainment, and his ideal of education soon took 
possession of the greatest princes in Italy. He taught Greek, 
Latin, Grammar, Philosophy, Mathematics, Logic, Music, and 
Dancing at the Casa Zoisa, the * House of Joy,' where he had 
settled in 1425 at the invitation of Gianfrancesco ii. of Mantua. 
Nor did he neglect athletics ; in the meadows of the Mincio 
shooting and fencing matches were arranged, together with 
the game of ^alla. Such scholars as could not afford to pay 
him he taught for the 'love of God.' His pupils included 



URBINO 123 

the noblest names in Italy ; all the children of the Gonzaga 
house were educated at Casa Zoisa, and no doubt met the 
Duke Federigo in the lecture-room and the meadows. 
Later Duke Federigo placed the great scholar's portrait in 
his palace at Urbino, with this inscription : ' In honour of his 
saintly master Vittorino da Feltre, who by word and example 
instructed him in all human excellence, Federigo has set this 
here.' It was to this man that he owed the fact that his 
court was famous throughout Italy, as was also that of his 
son, for culture and refinement and learning. During a 
hundred and ninety years from Federigo 's accession Urbino, 
unlike any other city in Italy, was free from oppression and 
disorder, and was governed by the princes of two dynasties, 
beloved and respected, who followed the tradition Federigo 
had from "Vittorino da Feltre. 

Much of Federigo's reign was occupied in fighting. A great 
general, he seems to have humbled most of his enemies, 
including Sigismondo Malatesta. Before he had reached his 
eighth year he had been married to G-entile Brancaleone, and 
this marriage proving barren, he had in 1454 obtained the 
Pope's brief of legitimation for his sons Bonconte and Antonio. 
In 1460, however, he married Battista Sforza, daughter of the 
Lord of Pesaro. Piero della Francesca in his pictures on the 
back of the portraits of Federigo and Battista in the Uffizi, 
has painted a kind of allegory in memory of the marriage. 
During the next few years he was still engaged in war, 
during which time the state was managed to a large extent 
by his wife, who appears to have been popular. It was after 
he had been married about four years that he seems to have 
won the leisure to attend to government at home, and to 
devote himself to those things which Vittorino had taught 
him to love. 

It seems to have been in 1454 that Federigo began to 
build the beautiful palace which to-day crowns the hill on 



124 THE CITIES OF UMBRIA 

which Urbino stands. Perhaps the finest palace in all Italy, 
it was the work of Luciano Laurano, helped, it may be, by 
Baccio Pontelli. Castiglione, in his Cortegiano, writes of 
the palace as follows: 'Among other laudable actions, 
Federigo erected on the rugged heights of Urbino a resid- 
ence, by many regarded as the most beautiful in all Italy ; 
and so amply did he provide it with every convenience that 
it appeared rather a palatial city than a palace. He furnished 
it not only with the usual plenishings of rich brocades in 
silk and gold, silver plate, and such like, but ornamented 
it with a vast quantity of ancient marble and bronze sculp- 
tures, of rare pictures, and musical instruments in every 
variety, excluding all but the choicest objects.' ' 

But it was as a book-collector that Federigo excelled. 
'To the right and left of the carriage entrance into the 
great courtyard are two handsome saloons, each about forty- 
five feet by twenty-two, and twenty-three in height. That 
on the left contained the famous library of manuscripts col- 
lected by Count Federigo; the corresponding one received 
the printed books, which, gradually purchased by successive 
dukes, became, under the last sovereign a copious collection.' 

It was on the 20th August 1474, towards the end of his 
life, that, with an escort of two thousand horse, he entered 
Rome, the Pope meeting him in the great doorway of 
St. Peter's to give him the dignity of duke. This honour, 
which was his due, conferred with splendid rituals and cere- 
monies, was not the only dignity which fell to him. On the 
18th August 1474 Edward iv. of England gave him the 
Garter, even at that time one of the most splendid honours 
in Europe. 

This truly great man died on the 10th September 1482, 
leaving a son aged ten years to succeed him. Prudent and 
wise, he was as good a soldier as he was a prince, and as 
generous a patron of learning as might be found in Italy. 



URBINO 125 

* In person,' says Muzio (whom Dennistoun quotes at great 
length, together with many others), ' In person Federigo was 
of the common height, well made and proportioned, active 
and stout, enduring of cold and heat, apparently affected 
neither by hunger nor thirst, by sleeplessness nor fatigue. 
His expression was cheerful and frank ; he was not carried 
away by passion, nor showed anger unless designedly. . . . 
If his kindness was notable in camp, it was much more so 
among his people. While at Urbino he daily repaired to 
the market-place, whither the citizens resorted for gossip and 
games as well as for business, mixing freely with them and 
joining in discourse, or looking on at their sports, like one 
of themselves, sitting among them or leaning on some one 
by the hand or arm. If in passing through the town he 
noticed any one building a house, he would stop to inquire 
how the work went on, encouraging him to beautify it, and 
offering him aid if required, which he gave as well as pro- 
mised. . . . Once meeting a citizen who had daughters to 
marry, he said : " How are your family 1 Have you got 
any of your girls disposed of ? " And being answered that 
he was ill able to endow them, he helped him with money 
or an appointment, or set him in some way of bettering 
himself.' Hundreds of anecdotes and stories are told of 
him by the chroniclers and historians, all going to show 
how much he was beloved, and with reason ; nor is there any 
that I can find which is to his discredit. 

His young son Guidobaldo i. succeeded him. You may 
see his portrait to-day in the Colonna Palace in Rome, 
painted by Sanzio, as you may see those of his father and 
mother, painted by Piero della Francesca, in the Uffizi. At 
the age of seventeen he married Elizabetta Gonzaga, the 
youngest daughter of Francesco, Marquis of Mantua, but 
by her he had no children. His household, if we may judge 
from the precise rules we possess which governed it, was as 



126 THE CITIES OF UMBRIA 

orderly as his father's. In his peaceful reign he was able to 
devote himself almost entirely to study and to the chase. His 
only trouble seems to have been that he was childless. He 
had adopted his nephew, Francesco Maria della Rovere, as 
his heir, and kept him near him at Urbino. Suddenly into 
the quiet serenity of those days in the woods and the 
gardens, or the great beautiful palace itself, a kind of tiger 
leapt. Cesare Borgia, that brutal genius, fell upon Urbino 
suddenly. Without a thought of defence Guidobaldo, to- 
gether with his nephew, fled to Mantua. Cesare Borgia 
ransacked the palace and carried his priceless booty to the 
Vatican, where the devil himself, masquerading as Pope 
Alexander vi., waited to receive it. Let it be said in 
extenuation of Guidobaldo that he was physically a weak- 
ling. Once or twice he managed to make headway against 
the Pope, and the Pope's son, but never for long. He 
retired to Venice really a beggar. Suddenly, almost as 
suddenly as Cesare Borgia had leapt on Urbino, Alex- 
ander VI. died. In a moment Cesare's magical empire 
departed from him, and he himself was a fugitive. Guido- 
baldo returned to Urbino, and, though much of the booty 
was never restored to him by the Church, passed the rest 
of his life among his treasures in the retirement of his court. 
It was then that that Golden Age began for Italy which in 
it^ expression and production has never since been equalled. 
Every sort of scholar came to Urbino : great poets, painters, 
sculptors, architects, engineers, doctors, priests, quacks of 
every kind, fools and nobles, dancing-masters and beautiful 
women, musicians and preachers flocked to the court of one 
of the most humane princes Italy had ever seen. It was 
then that Castiglione wrote his Cmiegiano and his life of 
Guidobaldo ; it was then that Sanzio entertained Piero della 
Francesca, that Melozzo da Forli came to court, and Luca 
Signorelli painted his work in San Spirito. In 1505 Pietro 



URBINO 127 

Bembo, that fine scholar and stylist, came to Urbino. Born 
in Venice in 1470, he was in 1505 already famous. KproUg4 
of the d'Este princes, he had seen Lucrezia Borgia enter that 
quiet household. This wanton and beautiful princess, whose 
acquaintance with every sort of vice was surely unique, seems 
to have become almost a child again in the serene life of the 
court of Ferrara. All her hateful childhood and youth seem 
to have fallen away from her and left her almost a girl again. 
A great friendship sprang up between her and Pietro Bembo. 
Their correspondence, which lasted from 1503 to 1516, is in 
great part published. And it is there, as I think, in those 
rhetorical letters in praise of the virtue rather than the 
beauty of so famous a princess, that we find the best refuta- 
tion of .the inevitable slander as to the purity of their 
affection. Coming to Urbino in 1505, Bembo stayed there 
during six years ; it was there he met Giuliano de Medici, 
to whom he owed so much. Going to Rome in 1512 in the 
company of Giuliano, Leo x., who was made Pope in the 
following year, appointed him his secretary. How often in 
his later life he regretted the unfettered existence of those 
days at Urbino appears from his correspondence again and 
again. 

The duke, who presided over this court of learning and 
art, was never in good health. A weakling from his birth, 
it was necessary for him to take his pleasure rather in the 
somewhat colourless delights of the library and the salon 
than in the field. 'His passage,' says Dennistoun, 'from 
mortality was peaceful ; and death, which he considered desir- 
able, spread like a gentle slumber over his stiffening limbs 
and composed features. At midnight of the 11th of April 
1508, his spirit was released from, its shattered tenement.' 
Thus died the last of the House of Montefeltro. 

He was succeeded by the first duke of the House della 
Rovere, Francesco Maria. This passionate man was a soldier 



128 THE CITIES OF UMBEIA 

rather than a scholar. His adventurous reign is full of 
murder and war. 'He was a prince of very violent temper,' 
says Symonds; 'of its extravagance history has recorded 
three remarkable examples, He murdered the Cardinal of 
Pavia with his own hand in the streets of Eavenna ; stabbed a 
lover of his sister to death at Urbino ; and in a council of war 
knocked Francesco Guicciardini down with a blow of his fist. 
When the history of Italy came to be written, Guicciardini 
was probably mindful of that insult, for he painted Francesco 
Maria's character and conduct in dark colours. At the same 
time this Duke of Urbino passed for one of the first generals 
of the age. The greatest stain upon his memory is his 
behaviour in the year 1527, when, by dilatory conduct of the 
campaign inLombardy,he suffered the passage of Friindesberg's 
army unopposed, and afterwards hesitated to relieve Eome 
from the horrors of the sack. He was the last Italian 
Condottiere of the antique type. . . . During his lifetime the 
conditions of Italy were so changed by Charles v.'s imperial 
settlement in 1530, that the occupation of Condottiere ceased 
to have any meaning.' Driven from Urbino by the Pope 
Leo X. who conferred his dukedom upon Lorenzo de Medici, 
he would by no means submit, but was not strong or rich 
enough to beat the Pope. In 1522, however, Francesco Maria 
returned to Urbino. Leo x. was dead, Lorenzo de Medici 
was dead, and Catherine his heir, soon to be Queen of France, 
did not press her claims. 

Francesco Maria's son Guidobaldo, by Leonora Gonzaga 
whom he had married in 1509, succeeded him. Of Guido- 
baldo II., surnamed Guidobaldaccio, there is little to say. He 
quarrelled with his subjects and retired to Pesaro, where 
he built the great palace, now the Prefettura, opposite the 
Church of S. Domenico. In the autumn of 1574 he appears 
to have gone to Ferrara to visit Henry iii. of France. On 
his way back to Pesaro 'during the great heats,' he fell ill 



URBINO 129 

and died on the 28th September. On the 30th January 1548 
Guidobaldo had married Vittoria Farnese, by whom he had a 
son and two daughters. It was this son, Francesco Maria ii., 
who succeeded him, the last Duke of Urbino. He was born 
on the 20th February 1549. His autobiography, extending 
from his birth to the marriage of his son, is an extraordinary 
work, full of curious information. It is this sad and mystical 
Duke whom Mr. Shorthouse has drawn so vividly for us 
in John Inglesant. He seems to have felt something of the 
same irresistible desire for solitude that forced Guido il 
Vecchio, his predecessor, into a Franciscan cell at Assisi. 
Married first to Lucrezia d'Este of Ferrara, whom he did 
not love, he permitted her to return to Ferrara, and later 
married Livia della Rovere. It seems to have been in his 
loneliness, deserted by his wife, that he became occupied 
with those haunting thoughts about religion which were so 
eagerly fostered by the Papacy that in 1631 they resulted in 
his bequeathing his Duchy to the Church. In youth we read 
that he used a flame vanishing into air as his device, with 
the motto, Quies in Suhlime — ' There is rest on high ' ; later 
he took a terrestrial globe with the legend, Ponderibus lihrata 
suis — ' Self -poised.' He grew more and more into a kind of 
uninstructed and ungoverned monk. His son by his second 
marriage, Prince Federigo-Ubaldo, was ruined in his youth. 
Spoiled by his father, 'taught to regard his subjects as 
dependants on a despot will,' he died in 1623 a victim to 
his own lusts and debaucheries. From this blow Francesco 
Maria never recovered. We see him, a kind of querulous 
shadow, pass across that fantastic stage at Urbino, in the 
pages of John Inglesant, ready to listen to the ranting of 
madmen and fanatic Lutherans and mad monks. Meantime 
he was in reality the plaything of the. Pope. As the cat 
deals with the mouse, so the Papacy dealt with this poor 
half-witted creature. In 1624 the last Duke of Urbino died, 
I 



130 THE CITIES OF UMBRIA 

and his Lordship became the absolute property of the Holy- 
See. 



There are times that come ever more rarely as we grow 
older, when in a moment almost we seem to understand the 
true character of a person or a place ; when suddenly the 
merely superficial mediocrity of the world disappears, and 
between two heart-beats we are face to face with reality. 
Perhaps it is thus the realities of the great world steal upon 
our virgin souls in childhood, cutting us off from heaven, 
telling us entrancing stories to which we cannot but listen, 
enthralled as we are by this beautiful and mortal world, 
this delightful and mortal flesh. It must be thus our powers 
and passions are developed, unconsciously for the most part. 
It would seem that the world whispers to us in our child- 
hood secrets that we never remember, but that leave their 
indelible mark — moods that we are subject to that have 
conquered us, desires and needs that we have not willingly 
developed, knowledge that we would, how gladly, forget. It 
was some such moment as this that was prolonged for me 
at Urbino, when at evening I would watch the shadows pass 
over the mighty foreheads of the mountains, those brows 
that the sun has kissed when night falls since the beginning 
of the world; and turning towards the dear city at my 
feet I understood how few are the years even of brass 
eternal. 



THE UMBRIAN SCHOOL OF PAINTING 



XIII 
UMBEIAN ART 

IN Umbria, that true Italia Mystica, among the hills which 
in the profound silence of the sunshine of early summer, 
under a calm and soft sky, are really like vast precious 
stones. Painting for the most part was content to be just 
a Eeligious vowed to God. She sometimes comes to us as 
in the work of Bonfigli, which is perhaps the greatest treasure 
of the Pinacoteca at Perugia, with something of the sweet- 
ness oi the nun, the oversweetness of which men have 
always been so suspicious; finding therein something not 
quite sane or amiable ; troubled in spite of a deep outward 
serenity by a subtle ugliness that has really only just missed 
a profound beauty. Or again, as in the magnificent work 
of Piero della Francesca, she appears with all the vitality and 
energy of life and yet with a kind of horror on her countenance, 
as in the face of the Eisen Christ at Borgo San Sepolcro. 
And at last in Perugino himself we seem to find a real 
duplicity in the cloying and exquisite sorrow that does not 
really afi"ect the soul, in his Crucifixions ; the insincerity and 
too delightful innocence of his warriors and captains in the 
Cambio; the affectation of his Nativity at Perugia; the 
awful facility of much of his work. That school of painters 
which in Umbria, and especially, in the valley of Perugia, 
painted, in the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, so 
tenderly, so emotionally, as it were, the story of Christianity 
may be studied perhaps better in Perugia itself than any- 

133 



134 THE CITIES OF UMBRIA 

where else in the world. There, gathered from church and 
convent, we find the works of Taddeo Bartoli, of Boccatis, 
and above all of Bonfigli and Fiorenzo di Lorenzo, housed in 
the Pinacoteca in the Municipio, and splendidly arranged 
in order for us, so that we may appreciate the gradual 
progress of the school towards such perfection as may be 
found in Perugino, Pintoricchio, and their followers. It is 
an expression chiefly of a profound and delightful sentiment 
that we find, far indeed from the intellectual travail of 
Florentine Art, or the magnificent acceptance of life that the 
Venetians show us. It is full of a very gracious spaciousness, 
at least in the greater men, that is noble, and siirely at one 
with the splendour and expanse of vale and hill in the 
country itself. They were not great men, these Umbrian 
painters ; perhaps only Piero della Francesca and Luca 
Signorelli, who were not really Umbrian at all, can rightly 
be called that ; but they were great artists capable of giving 
a host of people intense pleasure, charming them with the 
gentleness of their work, the emotion almost of tears, to be 
found in the story of Christ and Madonna ; the softness of 
the landscape and the luminous and perfect sky that have 
through them perhaps become in themselves religious ; the 
sheer beauty of all that, quite thoughtless and unphilo- 
sophical though it may be. It is, too, in these men that we 
find the expression of an emotion very diff'erent from the 
thoughtfulness and science of Florence with her desire for 
liberty and good government. Here in Perugia painting is 
one thing, liberty quite another. It is strange to remind 
oneself that, while Perugino was at work on his softest and 
gentlest works, the Baglioni and Oddi were slaughtering one 
another and the Perugians in the streets ; that the fiercest 
and most ferocious tyrants and bravos of the Eenaissance 
were filling the streets of the city, and even the cathedral, 
with blood and the cries of the wounded and the heaps of 



UMBEIAN AET 135 

the dead. But it is well to remember, too, in calling to 
mind those tumultuous days in Perugia, that at Urbino was 
established the most cultured court of Italy or of the world — 
a court whose influence was no doubt felt not only every- 
where in Umbria but throughout Italy, reconciling civilisa- 
tion with a race so warlike, and gradually forming the spirit 
of the modern world. 

Divided even in the earliest times into two schools which 
had their centres in Gubbio and Perugia, Umbrian painting 
is really provincial in the true sense of the word, the hand- 
maid of the Church, touching life only very rarely, intent for 
the most part on the service of the sanctuary ; having, indeed, 
no life at all, no possible life, apart from religion. Unlike 
Florence and Siena, Umbria had no Giotto nor Duccio to 
point out the road she should follow in her Art. For whereas 
Giotto made it for ever impossible for Florence to ignore 
painting as such, its problems and difficulties, while Duccio 
assured Siena of her great pictorial future, Umbria in these 
early years produced no great leader ; how should she, out of 
touch with life as she was, busied rather with action, fritter- 
ing away her life in infinitely tiny and cruel quarrels, or 
dreaming of the lives of the saints that she possessed in so 
great an abundance, weeping with St. Francis over her sins, 
or listening to the voice of Christ with the Blessed Angela of 
Foligno, ready to burn the world under the passionate 
eloquence of S. Bernardino, or praying night and day with 
Beata Colomba of Rieti ^ In those first years of the four- 
teenth century, when Giotto, Duccio, and the sculptors were 
busy recreating the Art of the world, Umbria was for the 
most part silent, her soul imprisoned in the mystery of her 
soft hills, very scornful of man, seeing that her ways so often 
ran with his blood, the which seemed to her less precious 
than the meanest of her dreams. And yet Umbria was not 
isolated from the world as Siena was. Only she was so 



136 THE CITIES OF UMBEIA 

much nearer Eome, that Eternal City which, busied always 
with action, government, dominion, has produced no really 
great artist ; has, indeed, never cared overmuch for Art for its 
own sake, but has used it rather as a means of expressing her 
own glory in glorious days ; impatient of it always under the 
Popes, and ready at the first whisper of scandal to cast it 
from her for ever. 

All the art of Italy is really an alien in Rome. She in 
her tragic and actual life, perhaps the most tremendous force 
in the world, ruined every beautiful thing she touched, har- 
nessing it to her chariot, or dragging it a splendid captive 
through her highways. So, having found Eaphael, that 
scholarly and serene soul, she drugged him with her enchant- 
ments, and compelled him to paint some of the most beauti- 
ful frescoes in the world on the awkward cramped walls of 
the Vatican, thinking of them chiefly as a decoration, but 
spoiling them as just that by her desire for reality, for the 
expression of life where it was most out of place. It is only 
the splendid genius of Raphael that has saved us from feeling 
the awkwardness, the difficulty, of the spaces he had to fill. 

It was the same with Michelangelo. That destroying 
genius, terrible in his isolation, who seems to be always 
brooding over some immense sorrow, is only not overcome by 
her because he has already been overwhelmed by his own 
personality, a more exacting master. Even his strong will, 
however, she bends at last, desiring that he shall forsake his 
true vocation, sculpture, and decorate with his unsatisfied 
genius the private chapel of her master the Pope. In that 
place where for centuries the vicegerent of God, not always 
observant of that Peace with mankind proclaimed in the 
dawn so long ago, has been chosen, Michelangelo created a 
terrible and immense crowd of sorrowful figures, each one of 
which seems to accuse the Papacy and God Himself of some 
tragic crime committed upon mankind — Adam, who so 



UMBEIAN ART 137 

languidly, so reluctantly touches the outstretched hand of the 
Creator ; pitiful humanity and our beautiful world drowned 
in that bitter unforgivable flood ; the mighty Sibyls bowed 
under the thoughts they dare only express in mysteries ; the 
tortured Prophets, the sacrificed messengers of God, the 
Athletes, and the Slaves. And above all, dwarfing every- 
thing, ignoring everything, stands the huge fresco of the 
Last Judgment, in which Man in all his beauty condemns 
God, and, as it might seem, rises from the ease and peace of 
the grave only to pronounce sentence on life for ever. 

This profound and wonderful vision of life by no means 
decorates the chapel of the Popes ; it dwarfs it. The air is 
so full of figures that we can see nothing. It is a torture to 
gaze upon that roof, physical as well as spiritual. We are 
overwhelmed by a crowd of passionate and insistent figures, 
so that it is impossible to look at anything, seeing that they 
all so eagerly claim our attention. To compare this chapel 
with the Upper Church at Assisi is to understand the extra- 
ordinary difference between the fourteenth century and 
the sixteenth, between Rome and any other city, between 
what Giotto conceived decoration to be and what Rome 
had forced it to become. In that quiet, empty church 
in the city of St. Francis, how perfectly Giotto has under- 
stood the limitations of reality ; nothing is thrust upon us, 
nor is there any overwhelming passion. Our real emotion 
will come, not from the quiet frescoes on the walls, but from 
the miracle of the Mass itself, said there so rarely and with 
so simple an earnestness. And at least we may there follow 
undisturbed the fair words of the liturgy, and become a little 
reconciled in the exquisite monotony of the plainsong, while in 
the Sistine Chapel we should be devoured by insatiable dreams. 

But Rome has ever been the insatiable mistress of the 
greatest men, luring them to every sort of destruction, 
and encouraging them in their mightiest follies ; for her 



138 THE CITIES OF UMBRIA 

what valour has not been spent, what heroic love has not been 
given always in vain, what terrible dreams have not ravaged 
and spoiled the world that she might go more proud ! The 
greatest geniuses she has slain like slaves, the most priceless 
love she has spent like dross. Washed in the blood of the 
martyrs, and of innumerable creatures with whom after 
all we share the world, she, the most beautiful, the most 
splendid adulteress, has taken Heaven captive, and in all her 
troubles proclaimed that visionary city as her true Capitol. 
She, the head and fount of our world, the true capital to 
whom the mightiest cities are but provincial towns, is 
sufficient for herself; nor has she ever touched an alien 
beauty without spoiling it. First it was the Art of that 
G-reece whom she had humbled that she strove to learn, 
always as one might learn a trick, always in vain. Then 
she forged out of the mysticism of Jesus of Nazareth the 
mightiest weapon of practical politics, and where He seemed 
to deny life she gave it to us more abundantly. And at last, 
it was the Art of Renaissance which she destroyed ; for after 
Michelangelo and Raphael comes the Baroque. 

And yet while I speak thus of her as of one who has 
but little of my affection, I love her — ah, how dearly ! — 
the one immortal city, the splendid burgonet of the world. 
Over the earth she has cast out her people, and because of 
her I live, and am free, and may look towards heaven with- 
out fear. When her enemies destroyed her temples and her 
gods, trampling into the earth even the fairest statues, the 
loveliest goddesses, she, in gentleness and love of a world she 
mothered, contrived others not less lovely in their stead. 
She led me to the embrace of Christ and showed me the 
beauty of the world. What were my England, whom she 
found naked and a child, without her, and all the splendid 
years, the dreams, the victories 1 The kings of the world 
have knelt to do her reverence, and the peoples have flocked 



UMBRIAN ART 139 

to kiss her stones. As a beautiful and splendid empress she 
has scorned the byways of life, her j)rogress has ever been 
along the fair imperial way. She has turned from Life and 
Pleasure and Beauty neither for the cursing of peasants nor 
for the brutal threats of the Teutonic barbarian. When our 
hand was in hers how happy were we— how fair our country, 
how merry our people ; and now that we have parted from 
her for a moment, with what distraction we regard one 
another ! One by one the fair and beautiful things have 
fallen away, the merry days no longer come, and Christ, once 
so gentle and so fair, is not any more divine, but from very 
far off demands a sober and a sombre world, bereft alike of 
beauty and of pleasure, since the way is so difficult, our 
enthusiasm so narrow. 

But, Rome, I will remember splendid days, and for- 
get the wrong my fathers did ! If they have denied life, 
thou hast kept it safe for me through all the tumult of the 
years. I will no longer remember their dim, sad thoughts, 
the anger at thy light, the boasting, and the fatal wars. For 
in quietness and in peace thou hast guarded the ancient 
things, the reverence, the fidelity, the beauty, that are from 
of old. And seeing that I only live because thou hast given 
me life and all precious things, the Songs that lift up my 
heart, the Law by v/hich I live, the Poetry that is very 
beautiful. Madonna Mary to pray for me and Christ to hold 
up my soul in His hands, — so thou hast taught and I believe 
' — shall I not love thee with all my heart, with all my mind, 
with all my soul, and with all my strength 1 for thou only art 
still as lovely as in old time, thou only art our. capital, thou 
only, Rome, in all the world, mayest still remember the deeds 
of Scipio, the face of Csesar, the words of Virgil, nor is there 
any other city whose brows are bound with immortality. 



140 THE CITIES OF UMBRIA 

The school of Art which flourished in Rome for so brief a 
period in the thirteenth century, had almost entirely dis- 
appeared by the year 1310. That fatal year saw the Papacy 
transferred to Avignon, not to be restored to Rome till, sixty 
years later, St. Catherine led Pope Gregory xi. by the hand 
into the Eternal City. In those sixty years a school of 
painting that really restored Art and Beauty to the world 
utterly perished. 

So early as the year 1210 the Cosmati were decorating 
the Roman churches with mosaics. And so it is in a little 
church at Civita Castellana, where we may still find their 
indestructible work— Christ in Benediction and the Symbols 
of the Evangelists — that we see what are really the begin- 
nings of the new Art in Italy ; the work of Laurence and his 
son Jacob, 'Magistri Doctissimi Romani,' as the inscription 
tells us. Here and there in Rome you may come upon 
their work still, in S. Alessio and at Aracoeli. That Jacob 
whose name is so piously preserved in the inscription at 
Civita Castellana would seem to have had a son named 
Cosmas, and the ' new Vasari ' ^ tells us that in the graceful 
chapel of the Sancta Sanctorum we may find his name in- 
scribed ' on the left-hand pilaster of the entrance ' — Magister 
Cosmatus fecit hoc Opus. It is then to this family that we 
must give the honour of the revival of Art in Italy. Long 
before Giotto or the fabulous Cimabue, who for Vasari at 
any rate are the first names of the Italian revival, the 
Cosmati had been at work in the capital of Christianity, 
seeking their inspiration in classical work, forming thereby 
a genuine school of Art, a Roman school, which in the work 
of Pietro Cavallini and his pupils was to make so deep an 
impression on the Art of Italy in the achievement of Giotto 
and the rest. In S. Maria in Trastevere in Rome, we may 
still find mosaics of the school — the Birth and Death of the 
^ Crowe and Cavalcaselle, op. cit., vol. i. p. 86. 




THE SACRIFICE OF ISAAC 

HOMAN SCHOOL . 
From a portion of a fresco in the Upper Chitjxh, Assist 



UMBRIAN ART 141 

Blessed Virgin, the Annunciation, the Nativity of Our 
Lord, the Adoration of the Magi, and the Presentation in 
the Temple. Ghiberti gives these works to Pietro Cavallini, 
a pupil of the Cosmati, an artist of the first rank, whose 
work without doubt gave Giotto the hint he needed. In 
S. Cecilia in Trastevere, his best work, perhaps, has lately 
been discovered — frescoes of the Last Judgment, in which 
we may see very easily the influence of the antique. And 
it is not only in Rome that we find the work of this great 
master and his school, but in the Upper Church at Assisi 
also. That great Franciscan church built in 1228, and conse- 
crated by Innocent IV. in 1253 as a monument to the 
memory of St. Francis, who lies buried beneath its foun- 
dations in the faintly coloured rock of Monte Subasio, is 
really an immense museum of Art. There the Roman school 
of Pietro Cavallini painted the walls and the roof with the 
Creation of the World, the Creation of Adam, the Creation 
of Eve, the Temptation, the Three Angels, the Betrayal of 
Jesus, and the Nativity.^ 

But with the school of Pietro Cavallini, so splendid in its 
vigorous and inspired achievement, we see at once the finest 
and the last work of the school of Rome. Working as it 
was perhaps up to the moment in which Pope Clement v. 
departed to Avignon, left without any patrons or employers, 
the school ceased to exist. And so we find that when, in the 
beginning of the fourteenth century, the Franciscans wished 
to continue the decoration of S. Francesco, it was to Florence 
and Siena they turned rather than to Rome. 

All Giotto's work in S. Francesco is strongly influenced 
by the works of the Roman school, and if we allow that his 
frescoes of the life of St. Francis in. the Upper Church were 
painted in 1302-1 306, ^ it may well be that he was in 

^ Crowe and Cavalcaselle, op. cit., vol. i. p. 96, note 3. 

2 See on this important question, op. cit., vol. ii. p. 14, note 1. 



142 THE CITIES OF UMBKIA 

reality a pupil of that school in a stricter sense than we had 
thought. 

How is it then, seeing that Rome had in the thirteenth 
century a school so splendid that Umbrian Art was almost 
unaffected by it, that it was to a Florentine and not to an 
Umbrian that the Franciscans turned for the decoration of 
their church ? The Umbrian school was, as is well known, 
of late development. Those little cities dotted among the 
mountains were each so small and so isolated, that it might 
seem they were incapable of producing a school of Art 
sufficiently enthusiastic to benefit by the work of the 
E-omans, until they were brought under the direct influence 
of that spirit which' later captured all Italy. Ottaviano Nelli 
died in 1445, Gentile da Fabriano was not born till 1360, 
and so we find that the Umbrian school is really a school 
of the fifteenth century. Such Art as there may have been 
before the last twenty years of the fourteenth century was 
too provincial, too naive, and merely religious-r-religious as 
the mere drudge of the Church — to benefit at all from an Art 
so splendid as that of the Roman school. In the years of 
exile at Avignon, Roman Art died never to rise again. So it 
is at last rather from Florence and Siena than from the great 
city at the head of her long valleys that Umbria learned the 
art of painting, when in 1360 Gentile da Fabriano was born, 
and fifty years later Piero della Francesca first saw the light 
in the little town of Borgo San Sepolcro. 

It was in Religion, the latest passion of the capital of the 
world, that in those early years Umbria achieved so much ; 
her saints are not the least famous upon earth. And even 
in Painting, that great ornament of Religion, she later accom- 
plished not a little. Raphael was born in Urbino, and 
learned the art of Perugino at Perugia, and although it was 
not until after he had been to Florence that he became of 
any real importance as an artist, something of the serenity 



UMBEIAN ART 143 

of his native country lingers about his work always — some- 
thing not proud, but humble, not unsatisfied, but contented. 
Nor is Michelangelo without his debt' to Umbria, though it 
be in less direct fashion. How much he learned from Luca 
Signorelli is perhaps in the case of so overwhelming a 
personality a matter of little importance. It could not 
have been so much that we should ever feel the debt. Yet 
no one can look at Signorelli's frescoes in the Cappella 
Nuova in the Cathedral at Orvieto and not feel something 
of the new genius that was about to burst on the world. It 
is not, however, as an Umbrian that we consider Raphael 
to-day, but rather as a Roman, as a classic painter of the 
high Renaissance, in whom already we begin to see signs of 
decadence ; a Roman, and therefore influenced by men from 
all provinces and cities and countries. Nor of course can 
we claim any real part in Michelangelo's work for Umbria. 
His ideas, the expression of which may have been in part 
suggested by Signorelli, are his own. No one of his own 
day understood them; those who were his disciples suc- 
ceeded in carrying the ideals of the great sculptor — for even 
as a painter he is a sculptor — to the ridiculous and the 
brutal. 

Seeing then that Rome, to whom she looked so naturally 
down her long valleys, was unable to satisfy her in her desire 
for Art, Umbria looked first into her own heart, and finding 
there little but dreams turned towards Siena, a city as 
piystical as herself, a city too of great saints, and learned 
much from her. 

Umbrian painting begins mth a certain Oderisi or Oderigi 
of Gubbio, whom Dante has placed in his Furgatorio ^ as a 
man so earnest in the study of his art as to have had little 
time for anything beside. Vasari, in his life of Giotto, says 
that Oderigi lived in Rome; that he was an excellent 
^ Purgatorio, canto xi. 



144 THE CITIES OF UMBRIA 

miniature painter, living on terms of close friendship with 
Giotto. He tells us further, that he himself had ' some few 
remains from the hand of the artist, who was certainly a 
clever man.' Dennistoun tells us that he died in 1299 ; but 
indeed we know nothing concerning him ; no work certainly 
from his hand has come down to us, though it is said that 
some miniatures in the missals in the archives of S. Pietro 
in Rome are his. His pupil Guido Palmerucci has left 
us some wall paintings in the chapel of the Palazzo del 
Commune, together with a S. Antonio — all that is left of 
a large painting which covered one of the walls of S. Maria 
dei Laici in Gubbio. Whether indeed these, old paintings, 
so ruined and so ghostly, be really his or not, would seem to 
matter little enough ; at the least, they are interesting ex- 
amples of Umbrian painting in the beginning of the fourteenth 
century. Palmerucci died in 1345, and Martino Nelli, the 
first of that family, appears to have been contemporary with 
him. Poor painter as he was, very little is left of his work 
in Gubbio to-day— a ruined fresco over a fountain in the 
Via Dante, and one or two other fragments, are all that 
remain to us of the work of a man whose very name would 
have perished but for the work of his son Ottaviano. With 
this man Umbrian Art really begins; the greatest of the 
Gubbian painters, his work has no little beauty. Like 
splendid miniatures, his paintings are gay with colour, they 
seem to be composed of curiously cut antique jewels. Too 
large to fit into the corners of the service-books, these 
pictures of Ottaviano Nelli's doubtless served somewhat the 
same purpose as the tiny pictures that greet you as you turn 
over those ivory leaves. They too were painted in the 
service of Religion, and even as the miniatures in the 
missals remind the priest, not without a certain serene 
joy, of the facts of Christianity, so these larger miniatures 
over the altar or upon the wall bring to the mind of the 




< -=5 

o ■~ 



UMBEIAN ART 145 

worshipper, how xauch more vividly than words can do, 
the story of Christ and Madonna — beings really to be 
worshipped seeing that they are seated on so magnificent 
a throne, dressed in such gorgeous apparel, gazing so uncon- 
cernedly upon humanity. It is perhaps in these huge 
miniatures that we find the living influence of forgotten 
Oderigi. 

Ottaviano had many pupils, but not one of them came to 
any fame. It is in Fabriano that Umbrian Art finds her true 
expression in the art of Gentile da Fabriano, the pupil of a 
certain Allegretto Nuzi, who was painting in Florence in 
1346, in which year he appears in the register of the painters 
of that city. Two pictures by him at any rate have come 
down to us — a Virgin and Child, now in the Lateran, and an 
altar-piece in the Sacristy of the Duomo at Macerata, the one 
dated 1365, the other 1369. It is here doubtless that we 
find the influence of the school of Oderigi, so soon to be 
forgotten in the work of Gentile da Fabriano. Scattered up 
and down Italy — in Florence, in Rome, in Milan, in Perugia, 
in Pisa, and in Orvieto — you find Gentile's work to-day, 
always with something of the delight in beauty and in 
exquisite things that is so characteristic of the school of 
Siena, with something too, perhaps, of the glowing, glittering 
colour of Ottaviano Nelli and the Gubbian school. A new 
kind of happiness comes to us from his pictures. He of all 
men has looked on Umbria for the first time and found her 
so fair that he dare hardly tell us of his delight. In such a 
dawn it was, he seems to say in his great picture in Florence 
— in such a dawn it was, as I myself have seen over the clear, 
soft hills, that Mary and Joseph, with our Lord, fled into 
Egypt. I know the very flowers by the way, they were so 
many and so fair, since by that road went the Prince of Life. 
For the first time in Umbrian painting a painter has ventured 
to tell us that the world is fair. Long and long ago Umbria 
K 



146 THE CITIES OF UMBRIA 

had dreamed of heaven and listened to the very voice of 
Christ, that voice as of many waters, confusing the simple 
sounds of the world, till suddenly she seems to awaken in 
Gentile da Fabriano a kind of apprehension of her own loveli- 
ness. It was but for a moment that life was able to disturb 
her in her contemplation. When G-entile died, he left no 
successors. Into the enchanting, distracting music of the 
world sweeps again that voice of many waters, drowning 
everything in its own perfection and sweetness. Gentile 
died in 1427; in him the Umbrian school pure and simple 
found its greatest painter ; with him it came to an end. 
With the appearance of Piero della Francesca, influences from 
without, Florentine, Sienese, even, it may well be, north 
Italian, came into Umbrian painting. By 1447 Fra Angelico 
and Benozzo Gozzoli were at work in Orvieto, and their 
influence may be found throughout Umbria. There were, 
however, numerous isolated schools of painting among the 
mountains, which were almost entirely local in their develop- 
ment. Of these the earliest would seem to have been that 
of San Severino, where Giacomo and his brother Lorenzo 
painted about the year 1400. It is in their work, and more 
especially in that at Urbino, where, in the Oratory of St. 
John Baptist, they have painted the story of that saint, that 
Morelli has thought we first meet with portraits of men and 
women 'full of life and expression.' A namesake of one of 
those painters, whose work is in the National Gallery, signed 
'Laurentius ii.,' was painting so late as 1481. 

But it is in another of these little cities that we find the 
founder of the school, if school it may be called, which later 
attained to such fame under Perugino. Foligno, that little 
town in the valley not far from Assisi, produced a painter in 
the middle of the fifteenth century in Niccol6 da Foligno, 
called by Vasari Niccol6 Alunno. Born about 1430, he was 
almost certainly the pupil of Benozzo Gozzoli, who, between 




THE ADORATION OF THE MAGI 

GENTILE DA FABRIANO 
From the altar-piece in the Accademia delle Belle Arti, Florence 



UMBEIAN ART 147 

Eome and Florence, painted much in Umbria. Mystical poet 
as he is, he thrusts upon us his sincere grief or joy in the 
life of Christ or the Blessed Virgin in so irresistible a fashion 
that we are captured almost at the first glance. ' The result 
is,' as Mr. Berenson has well said, 'that with precisely the 
same purpose as the later Bolognese, he holds our attention, 
even gives us a certain pungent, dolorous pleasure ; while we 
turn away from Guido Reni with disgust unspeakable.'^ 
And it is not only of a painter so enamoured of the flesh as 
Guido Reni that Niccol6 disgusts us, but even of Perugino, 
whose affectations and insincerity are intolerable beside the 
simple beauty, the sincere religion of the founder of the 
Perugian school. Nor is Niccold without claim upon our 
notice as- a painter pure and simple. Pictorial though he be, 
as indeed is all the school, his line and colour are full of 
emotion, his figures move with the true impulse of life. 

The influence of Fra Angelico and Benozzo Gozzoli, almost 
universal in Central Italy, is found in the works of Bonfigli 
of Perugia, a more naive but less divine interpreter of the 
promises of Christ. Coming to Umbria in 1447, and to 
Perugia herself in 1457, Benozzo Gozzoli probably taught 
Bonfigli something of his art — that art which is so pretty, so 
charming a treasure of the Pinacoteca Vannucci to-day. 
Here at last, in this so timid intelligence, we find the roots 
of that charm, that sentimental beauty, which has so captured 
the world — the roots of what afterwards flowered so luxuri- 
' antly in Perugino and Pintoricchio — a particular eflfect of light, 
a suggestion of gold in the air, something of that serenity 
which Perugino knew so well how to express. His angels, of 
which there are so many in the Pinacoteca, are among the 
most charming things in the world ; crowned so fantastically 
with roses, they are as delightful and almost as affected as any- 
thing in Perugino's work. It is not for him to devote himself 

^ Berenson, Central Italian Painters^ p. 87. 



148 THE CITIES OF UMBEIA 

to the art of painting, seeing that he is intent on quite 
another service — to wit, the illustration of the lives of 
Madonna and the saints. What in the way of science he has 
learnt from Era Angelico or • Benozzo Gozzoli — that teacher 
of the third class from Florence — he has learnt as it were by 
heart without any real consciousness of its value. And since 
there is so little thoughtfulness in his work, he remains a 
delightful but less spontaneous, less original illustrator of 
heaven than Era Angelico, without the genius and the science 
of that master, but charming, lovable, as exquisitely 
obvious as Perugino and all the school which is in itself 
the one feminine school in Italy, content to be charming and 
delightful, and refusing thought, having perhaps no need 
of it. 

Meantime another master, greater than any living Umbrian, 
had appeared in Piero della Erancesca. Born at Borgo San 
Sepolcro in 1416, his work was certainly one of the most 
astonishing achievements of the age. He appears to have 
painted in Perugia as well as in Urbino, Arezzo, and Loretto ; 
and in Eome his work was destroyed to make room for that 
of Raphael. Fiorenzo di Lorenzo, who was working in 
Perugia in 1487, a pupil, it may well be, of Benozzo Gozzoli, 
or even of Bonfigli, seems to have met this curiously thought- 
ful painter early in life. How different is his work ever 
after ! With the single exception of a picture by Piero della 
Erancesca, Fiorenzo's work is perhaps the chief delight of the 
gallery at Perugia. He was the realist of a fortunate age. 
In those delightful little panels — if indeed they be his — in 
the Gabinetto di Fiorenzo di Lorenzo we see all the passionate 
and languid figures of those ferocious years at their happiest 
moments, posing before their fellows, or listening to the 
loving words of S. Bernardino of Siena. The beautiful 
palaces of marble, set in I know not what perfection of land- 
scape, jewelled with tiny lakes under a lofty and perfect sky, 



UMBRIAN AET 149 

are, as it were, the creations of one who understood the 
dreams of this people, so capable of mysticism, so eager for 
power, for heaven, for the lives of their foes. A kind of 
music seems to thread its way through his delicate landscapes, 
and in the Marriage of St. Catherine and the Nativity fresco 
to break into a concord of sweet sounds long drawn out, 
unwearied and full of joy. 

Fiorenzo's work lends a spirit of antique cheerfulness to the 
Pinacoteca at Perugia beyond anything of the sort to be found 
in the somewhat cloying sweetness of Perugino. He seems to 
have seen the very spirit of the fifteenth century objectively, 
almost as Piero della Francesca sees his subjects — as though 
she were a stranger in Florence or Perugia, through whose 
fierce and rugged streets she trips, a vision of new beauty. 
In this series of eight pictures of scenes in the life of 
S. Bernardino of Siena a new elegance transforming the old 
religion, almost certainly aiding it profoundly in its encounter 
with the new spirit, seems to have come into the Piazza and 
the streets of the old warrior city — something infinitely more 
subtle and perhaps more sincere than the sentiment of 
Perugino. Fiorenzo's two pupils — for so I take them to have 
been — Perugino and Pintoricchio, made the school famous — 
painted in the Sistine Chapel, in Siena, in Florence, and in 
their day were as famous as any painters in Italy. Perugino, 
indeed, probably manufactured, for there is no other expres- 
sion for his methods, more religious pictures than any other 
painter in Italy. He managed a kind of workshop of pious 
paintings, employing many pupils and workmen, and allowed 
their feeble and sentimental work, often quite unworthy of 
him, to appear as his own. But in spite of every disadvantage 
inherent in so brutal a commercialism, his achievement is 
secure. As what has been called by Mr. Berenson ' a space- 
composer,' ^ he has few equals in all the history of his Art. 
^ Berenson, Central Italian Art, page 95. 



150 THE CITIES OF UMBKIA 

If his pupil Raphael surpassed him, it was rather by reason 
of his teaching, perhaps, than by any original comprehension 
of space that Eaphael possessed. 

The achievement of Pintoricchio is different. His touch is 
much heavier than Perugino's, as we may see to-day by com- 
paring their work in the Sistine Chapel. In him we see 
really the goal of the purely pictorial school achieved — a 
perfect 'illustration,' a lovely and ornamental explanation of 
the subject. Not that the subject is everything, but that 
movement, life, painting, are nothing, and the most important 
thing in his work certain delightful ornamental thoughts — 
poetical, charming — which the painter has given us on certain 
subjects, such as the Nativity, or St. Catherine disputing 
with the Doctors, or the Life of Pius II. 

But after all, here in Umbria, it is a splendour of space, a 
light that never was in any other sky, a breadth and nobility 
of landscape, a softness over hill and valley, that we must 
look for rather than the terrible travail and earnestness of 
the Florentine school. We are in Italia Mystica — the 
country of St. Francis ; heaven here is really more precious 
than earth. And it is perhaps the expression of this mood 
of the soul that has brought Perugino his fame, though it 
may well be he himself had something of a contempt for it. 

So unimportant in comparison with the schools of Florence 
and Venice, less even than the school of Siena in the History 
of Painting, the Umbrian school yet brings us the most 
famous and beloved name in modern art — Raphael Sanzio. 
But it is not as an Umbrian we think of Raphael, but rather 
as a Roman painter. He learned from so many and so 
various teachers — from Lionardo, Francia, and Bartolommeo, 
no less than from Giovanni Sanzio, Perugino, and Pintoricchio. 
And yet even in his latest work — the Transfiguration, in the 
Vatican— after he has encountered all the greatest intelligences 
of his day, how he brings back to us the soft distances, the 



UMBRIAN ART 151 

spacious golden air of Umbria ! In his youth his work had 
been so like to Perugino's that in Florence he had been 
encouraged to persevere in it in the hope of one day achiev- 
ing or even surpassing the charm, the soft and lovely excel- 
lence of his master. How "perfectly he has learned every 
lesson, how humbly he has listened to every teacher ! It is 
easy to see that his youth was spent in Umbria. His per- 
sonality, never very strongly marked, seems to have absorbed 
all or almost all that was best in his contemporaries, and 
to have added something of the serenity, the quiet delight in 
beautiful things for their own sake, the loyalty to the old 
great masters, that were so conspicuously his own. It is as a 
scholar among masters that we see him, content even to the 
end of his life to learn and to. absorb everything that was 
fair with which he came in contact ; not the art of painting 
only, but scholarship, philosophy, history, poetry, the classics 
also, transforming them into his own terms, and finding in 
them the serenity and beauty of his own nature, as we have 
scarcely been able to do in the centuries since his death. 
Without the great nervous strength of so profound, so subtle 
a personality as Lionardo, or the immense physical virtue of 
Michelangelo, he died at thirty-seven years of age. And 
he is like a relic from the classical age ; some perfect, serene 
god, blithe and beautiful, discovered, as it were, by some 
happy fortune, in a time so in love with pagan culture as the 
sixteenth century. And even as his work has something 
of the indestructible perfection of the antique, its precise 
virtue, its ideality, so in his own body he was beautiful and 
delicate. His nature was so transparent that everything 
that was really life-giving shone through it as the sun. The 
disorder, the tragic rebellion of" Michelangelo were impos- 
sible for him. He could never have been sufficiently lawless 
in his imagination or passions to violate the instinct of rever- 
ence. And so we find in him a kind of impotence that, after 



152 THE CITIES OF UMBRIA 

all, overwhelms even a nature so strong and so impetuous as 
Michelangelo at last. 

Of all that imperious and splendid age, glittering with 
many cruelties, shadowy with subtleties that in the end made 
Art impossible, Raphael is the saviour. The presence of his 
nature is like a fair soft light over everything, or like a perfect 
flower in the midst of a battlefield. Rather than any saint 
or soldier, or philosopher, or man of genius, he serves as the 
type of the Renaissance at its highest ; and his impotence — 
if we may so call it — is nothing more than the failure of all 
art to express, to do more than shadow forth,, that perfect 
state which Plato has seen lying in the heavens, which 
St. Paul has assured us is eternal there. 




THE RESURRECTION 

riKKO DELLA FKANCESCA 
From the fresco hi the Galleria Coniiinale, Borgo Sa^isepolcro 



XIV 

PIEEO DELLA FEANCESCA 

IN Vasari's Lives of the Painters there is much that modern 
criticism, working for the most part negatively, has 
destroyed or at least questioned, and having robbed us as 
in so many instances of much that we had come to regard 
with a kind of affection, it has yet dealt with Piero della 
Francesca in a more friendly fashion, re-establishing for him, 
as it were, a reputation that our fathers had forgotten. 
Vasari regards Piero chiefly as a kind of inspired mathe- 
matician, a painter devoted to the study of perspective, rather 
than as a subject for aesthetic criticism. But for us, long 
after the disputing as to the subjective or objective quality 
in his work shall be hushed, he will remain a painter of rare 
power and beauty, so that we shall find ourselves in sympathy 
with him when Perugino, with all his facile and effeminate 
beauty, has become a burden, and the perfection of Raphael 
has failed to satisfy our desires. 

Born at Borgo San Sepolcro, according to Vasari, about 
the year 1406, he was the son of Benedetto dei Franceschi 
and of Romana di Perino. His father who, Vasari says, died 
before his son's birth, would seem in reality to have lived 
till 1465, so that the boy's education was by no means left 
entirely to the care of his mother.- Of his early youth we 
possess unfortunately no details at all, bxit at fifteen years of 
age he became a painter, probably in the studio of Domenico 
Veneziano, though it was not till the year 1439, Veneziano 

153 



154 THE CITIES OF UMBEIA 

being then in Florence painting in the Ospedale and in 
S. Maria Novella, that we hear of them as working together. 
From 1439 to 1445 he would seem to have remained with 
Veneziano, but actually we .know scarcely anything of his 
life during those years. But in 1445 the Brotherhood of the 
Misericordia at Borgo San Sepolcro commissioned him to 
paint an altar-piece for their chapel. This is the Madonna 
della Misericordia, which during the year 1903 was removed 
from the Chapel of the Ospedale and placed in the Municipio. 
It may well have been after he had finished this picture for 
his birthplace that, in the company of Domenico Veneziano, 
he proceeded to Loretto to paint certain frescoes in the old 
Church of Our Lady of Loretto. It would appear that, the 
plague becoming very severe during their stay, they were 
forced to depart because of it. There is nothing by Piero 
to-day in all that strange place ; it seems probable that he 
worked in the old church which was destroyed in 1465, when 
the present Chiesa della Santa Casa was begun for Pope 
Paul II. by the Florentine Giuliano da Majano. Whether 
Piero proceeded to Rome in the company of Domenico 
immediately after leaving Loretto is uncertain. But Nicolas v. 
who had sent for him, when he came to Rome, set him to 
paint that room in the Vatican where Raphael, having been 
compelled to destroy Piero's work, has painted the ' Disputa ' 
and ' The Deliverance of St. Peter from Prison.' It has been 
suggested, and is indeed almost a tradition, that the strange 
effect of light in the latter fresco was suggested to Raphael 
by one of the frescoes he destroyed, no doubt unwillingly. 
It is remarkable that in the fresco at Arezzo where Constantine 
lies sleeping in his tent during a vision, Piero has achieved in 
a moment, as it were, the whole secret of light — light conceived 
not simply as mere sunshine but as a kind of spirit fallen 
on everything, gracious and splendid even in the shadows, 
which are certainly no mere masses of indifferent obscurity 



PIEEO DELL A FRANCESCA 155 

but pools of cooler light only less luminous than that sword 
of heavenly flame which has flashed from heaven and 
swept a path through the moonlight for the message of an 
angel. 

It may be that Piero was in Rome from 1447 to 1451, or 
from 1451 to 1455, but actually in the year 1451 he was at 
the court of Sigismondo Malatesta, one of the most extra- 
ordinary and interesting of the many curious personalities of 
the Renaissance. This strange and wayward dreamer was at 
the same time a man of action of the most brutal sort. His 
crimes, mysterious and incredible almost, are too horrible to 
dwell upon. He murdered three wives, and at last died the 
husband of the beautiful and learned Isotta degli Atti, who 
had long been his mistress. In his own honour and because 
he loved her, he rebuilt the Cathedral of S. Francesco at 
Rimini, consecrating a chapel, 'Divae Isottae Sacrum.' The 
beautiful church remains one of the most interesting monu- 
ments in Italy. For in Sigismondo's brain there was a dream 
which he seems to have shared with Pico della Mirandola — a 
dream that suggested the possibility of the gods of Greece 
and Rome being after all only in exile, awaiting, perhaps, 
man's return to sanity and the desire of life. But, egotist 
as he was, he himself was his own god, and so it is really for 
himself and for the woman he loved that he employed Alberti 
to build his temple and his tomb, where upon every arch and 
string-course, in every piece of sculptured work, appear the 
elephant and the rose, his emblems, and his insolent and yet 
pathetic legend : ' Sigismundus Pandulphus Malatesta Pan. 
F. Fecit Anno Gratiae mccccl.' 

So it was in this temple of Malatesta in the Cappella delle 
Reliquie that Piero painted the -beautiful fresco of Sigis- 
mondo kneeling before his patron saint, which we find in its 
own place to-day. Sigismondo himself is seen in perfect 
profile, a method of portraiture that seems to have been 



156 THE CITIES OF UMBEIA 

especially dear to Piero, for he used it many times, and 
certainly instructed otkers in the advantage of this manner. 
It was so he painted the Duke and Duchess of Urbino, now 
in the Uffizi, and a certain portrait attributed to him in the 
Poldo Pezzoli Collection at Milan, of a lady supposed to be 
the wife of Joannes de Bardi, which however is only very 
doubtfully his own. But here in Eimini in this strange 
church we see the figure of him who built it, in full length, 
kneeling before his saint, St. Sigismund of Burgundy. 
Behind Sigismondo are two magnificent hounds, and you 
look into the picture at a landscape full of the splendid 
spaciousness of Perugino, with something over all how 
different from anything Perugino ever painted, even in his 
youth. Some profound and noble energy, some altogether 
gracious strength and measured sweetness, disengage them- 
selves from this fading picture made so long ago. It is ful- 
filled with the air of the mountains, those strong and fresh 
winds that since God brought them out of His treasures have 
touched no earth but this. And amid all this freshness, this 
mysterious nudity of Nature, as though one were looking 
on a landscape before the creation of man, between two 
beautiful pillars hung with garlands Sigismondo kneels, 
inscrutable, with half-closed eyes, his beautiful hair low on 
his forehead and almost covering his ears, his hands clasped 
as though to quiet his unruly spirit, his lips shut close as 
though to hide some curious smile. 

Having finished his work at Eimini, it is possible that 
Piero proceeded to Eome. However this may be, Yasari 
suggests that he returned from Eome to Borgo San Sepolcro 
on account of the death of his mother. It must have been 
about this time, certainly after he had painted the fresco at 
Eimini, that he painted the magnificent series of frescoes in 
S. Francesco at Arezzo, by far the most considerable piece of 



PIEEO DELL A FEANCESCA 157 

work that he achieved during his whole life. The legend of 
the Holy Cross, its history from the beginning of the world 
until it was discovered by the Emperor Heraclius, and later 
by St. Helena, is one of the most curious dreams of the 
Christian mind. No longer upheld in its entirety by the 
Catholic Church, it is nevertheless true in its intention, since 
for the Middle Age at least the Cross was indeed a lovelj^ 
branch of the Tree of Life which is in the midst of the 
Paradise of God. And even as the earth in the beginning 
held that which bore the secret of immortality, so it was at 
last in the sweet soil, very deep in the ground, from which 
we too were made, that the mother of the emperor found 
the cross of palm, of cedar, of cypress, and of olive, and 
'waited what God would do.' The beautiful legend told by 
Jacques de Voragine in the thirteenth century, and trans- 
lated into English by William Caxton, is but one, albeit 
perhaps the loveliest, of those histories he thought worthy 
to be called ' legends worth their weight in gold.' And it is 
this golden legend that Piero has painted so vigorously in 
the choir of S. Francesco at Arezzo. How far are we in 
contemplating these frescoes from the passionate asceticism, 
the unearthly beauty of Fra Angelico ! It is as though a 
new desire had suddenly been born into the world, a desire 
for life, where Fra Angelico after all would have been content 
with death, or would have seen life in exquisite distorted 
fashion down the transforming vista of mortality, with all the 
changes of the grave between him and that perfection of life. 
But with Piero it is different. What magnificent vitality 
he has given to these beautiful women, how valiant are his 
men, how puissant his angels ! And above all, he has filled 
earth and heaven with radiant light. It is in the clear and 
nimble air, in the fair white light of our real and beautiful 
daylight, that he alone of his contemporaries has dared at 
last to paint man and woman in all the sweet energy of life. 



158 THE CITIES OF UMBRIA 

full of that long breath of God which at dawn in a garden 
first gave us life. The air, exquisite as a precious stone 
faintly coloured with the thought of God, caresses the fair 
flesh of his figures as in our world, only he has given it some 
perfection which we can only hope to see. For his light is 
the light of the profound air of heaven, and he seems to 
rejoice and be glad in it, as the musical lark which adventures 
nearer than we dare to the sun, which is as the smile of God. 
He has already discovered that there is no black in all our 
world. Along the low horizon of the east he has laid the 
shadow of the fingers of God, which is the fairest sunrise ; 
and it is the flash of an angel's wings that, obscures the 
moonbeams with light, while through the tired eyelids, 
delicate and translucent, of the great emperor, dazzles the 
Cross, itself a glowing jewel, which brings his heaviness to an 
end with a vision of morning. These clouds for ever a-sail 
so delicately in his sky, what are they but light expressed 
and made visible, more fragile than the sunbeams, of which 
indeed they are the delicate, white daughters, made not of 
earth, but of dew and light and the jewelled fragments of 
the sea. They have the shape of the wings of angels, and 
they are as fair as the fairest. They are the ships of 
heaven burthened with light. They are the children of the 
sun ; from him they set out whiter than snow in the dawn, to 
him they will return at evening, drenched through and 
through with the colour of heaven. For Piero alone of all 
his fellows seems to have observed a new form of energy in 
light itself j to him it is the one thing that is very precious. 
He perhaps understood that the act of creation began and 
ended with Fiat Lux. From that moment life began, and 
lasts while the sun, or the light, or the moon, or the stars be 
not darkened, or the ceaseless dawns that encircle our world 
be not finished, or the luminous night shall still climb out of 
the reluctant sea, until the shadows flee away because there 



PIERO BELLA FRANCESCA 159 

is no more light under the sky, since it has fled back into the 
eyes of God. 

One lonely and magnificent figure he left behind him at 
Arezzo in the cathedral — a figure of St. Mary Magdalen, 
very noble and reticent. She adorns no altar, but in a quiet 
corner of the great church — a little lonely, because, perhaps, 
unlike the great multitude of the saints, she has loved much, 
and seen, and understood, and has sufi"ered great experiences, 
and only learned to acquiesce at last in the scrupulous orderli- 
ness of God because of love — she stands very sorrowful, 
since she alone of all those clouds on clouds of saints really 
understands. Well, it is always so ; we find Piero emotion- 
ally under the influence of the Middle Age, and yet himself 
perhaps a. kind of emancipator or deliverer from its mysticism, 
at times hardly less astonishing than Luca Signorelli, his 
pupil. For he, too, was occupied rather with his art than 
with the expression of ideas about religion. He was the 
first painter, perhaps, to study perspective scientifically. 
Problems of light, the action of light on beautiful faces or 
hair, the action of light upon light, would certainly seem to 
have fascinated him almost all his life long. And yet he has 
not discarded the ideas that were then gradually becoming 
less insistent in the world, but in all their modesty and 
beauty he has used them without question as a means of 
attaining a beauty bought with much toil and feverish 
endeavour. His Magdalen is not the ecstatic and splendid 
.courtesan that we see in Titian's canvas, but a beauti- 
ful and lonely woman, who will ever remember that 
lingering dawn in the garden, when, in the midst of 
her passionate weeping, the gardener came so quietly and 
spoke her name, and in a moment she knew Him whom 
she had loved. 

So Piero, having finished his work at Arezzo, returned, 
perhaps, to his birthplace ; and it is there, indeed, that we 



160 THE CITIES OF UMBRIA 

find the most extraordinary of his works. The ' Resurrection 
of Christ ' in the Municipio at Borgo San Sepolcro is, perhaps, 
the most beautiful representation of the triumph of Christ in 
the world. It is not easy to see it. You journey over the 
mountains from Arezzo for hours amid all the clear beauty 
of Tuscan hills, that have something not Tuscan about them — 
a softness, a glamour, that is found, perhaps, only in Umbria ; 
and at last in the valley of the Tiber you come upon a tiny 
city at the foot of Monte Maggiore of the Central Apennines. 
There, amid all the quietness of a country place, in the cool 
rooms of the Municipio are set such works of Piero as remain 
in his birthplace — an altar-piece in oil and tempera, till lately 
in the Ospedale della Misericordia, and two frescoes, San 
Ludovico and the Resurrection. The fresco of the Resurrec- 
tion comes upon us with a kind of surprise; we had not 
suspected Piero of so much thoughtfulness. It is as though 
he had listened to some voice, or seen a vision, or on some 
fortunate day been led away the captive of Love, for him as 
for Dante, a Lord of terrible aspect, who has shown him the 
places of Death and Sorrow. In the cold light of the earliest 
morning, mere sunless dawn as yet, Christ has risen, and 
is standing in His tomb. His experience is in His face, the 
dawn of a knowledge, perhaps, of the sorrows of humanity. 
It is as though for the first time He had really understood 
the power of evil, to which, after all, we are so unwillingly 
the slaves, the hopeless misery of that state of imperfect 
love. The noise of hell has furrowed His face, and He has 
only just escaped into our quiet world. Beneath that terrible 
and beautiful figure, inspired for the first time with thought, 
down whose endless vistas his soul has fled these three days 
and nights, lie four soldiers, sleeping in the noiseless twilight. 
Behind the green trees on the right the first exquisite frail 
light of dawn is coming to comfort the world, and with the 
return of the Prince of Life the first day of spring has come ; 



PIERO DELLA FRANCESCA 161 

already the flowers have blossomed and the trees budded 
behind Him as He came out of the sunrise, and when He shall 
turn at last into the garden, where Mary will find Him, those 
bare boughs, that naked hillside, that brown and sterile earth 
will quicken too, even as the hills that He has already crossed. 
All the passion of His encounter with Death and the dead is 
graven on His face, and though men sleep He can know no 
rest ; He is up before them, and the whole long day is waiting 
for Him. He is stronger than Time, which has swept every- 
thing away, for He who made Death has struck Him dead 
again. Ah, in looking on this fresco, one seems to understand 
that for all those years before He came there is only silence. 
For Piero has expressed not only the old magical truths of 
Paganism and Christianity, the joy of the world at the 
coming of spring, the triumph of the Prince of Life in a 
world pallid with, the fear of Death, but the subtler and 
more terrible thoughts, too, of the age of thought that was 
just then dawning for the world. He seems to see a God 
no longer delicate and exquisitely pitiful, gracious and 
victoriou-s in an encounter where the end was not doubtful 
for a moment, but one innocent and almost ignorant of evil 
and the tragedy of mankind ; really at home only in heaven, 
or in the desert of Judaea on the banks of the Dead Sea, 
a place of stones and precipices too desolate for thought. 
We see this figure standing almost dreadful in solemnity in 
the waters of the Jordan while John pours the water from 
the shell over His head, and the white Dove hovers above 
Him in profound stillness, in the Baptism now in the National 
Gallery. The desolate country, of a cool brown and grej^, 
stretches away over hill and valley beyond the city, which 
later brought the tears to His eyes when He thought of its 
unavailing joy. Three angels stand aside surprised and 
afraid, so terrible has the Christ become after even so long 
in the company of men. And again the same figure, a little 
L 



162 THE CITIES OF UMBEIA 

younger, a little less lamentable, less tragic or isolated, stands 
attentive, as John Baptist in the Perugia altar-piece, while 
above this a sweet and valiant angel, under the pillars of some 
cool colonnade, speaks his message to Madonna. And again, 
the same figure, as I think, lies dead and helpless on His 
mother's knees in a beautiful Pieta now in Perugia. For 
Piero, certainly, Christ has no form nor comeliness ; His 
beauty is departed from Him. As a child He is already 
rather strange than beautiful ; and as the youth whom John 
baptizes, He would seem already to have felt the weight of 
the world heavier than a hundred crowns. As He lies dead 
upon His mother's knees, something of that heavenly beauty, 
mysterious and symbolical, may be found, for Death has 
kissed Him at last and given his inscrutable peace ; but in the 
majestic figure of the risen Christ we find, indeed, a real and 
perfect beauty, the dream of the world since the beginning. 
In that figure, standing there in the tomb, I seem to find 
the calm and intense majesty of the statues. He looks vaguely 
out at the worlds and yet not at the world, comprehending 
it for the first time, perhaps ; and it is not any profound joy 
you find in His countenance. 

In a lovely picture of the Nativity in the National Gallery, 
full of cool greys and I know not what perfection of simple 
morning, a tiny choir of angels sings the Glwia in Excelsis, 
while He who is come so humbly into our world lies with 
arms stretched out to His mother, who worships Him. Well, 
on His return from Hades at the dawn of a day so difi'erent, 
something of that same vague helplessness seems suggested, 
perhaps, by the very intensity of His look or His loneliness. 
He seems almost to be aware of a virtue within Himself, 
which is wasting itself uselessly. His perfection. His strength 
is the forlorn hope of the world. The sorrows of the world 
have not wearied Him, but have entrenched His face with the 
scars of thought. A whole multitude, vast and tremendous, 



PIEEO DELLA FEANCESCA 163 

has drunk of the well of His tenderness, and He has only just 
escaped from their terrible desires. , 

Thus, one finds in Piero's work much of the though tfulness 
of Luca Signorelli, his pupil^ together with a freshness and a 
beautiful kind of strength that is rare in Luca. Vasari says 
that he became blind ; but one is relieved in thinking thus of 
his dejected old age — he died in 1492, aged eighty-six — to 
know that any such statement is quite unauthenticated. 
' Sanus mente, intellectu et corpore,' he says of himself in 
1487; it is hardly the language of a blind man. His work 
has a kind of suggestiveness very rare in Art — a kind of dis- 
tinction that is certainly, as I find it, the expression of a 
personality of great strength. For without personality Art 
is the feeblest of pretensions. Everywhere in his work we 
find the same exquisite vitality, reticent and scrupulous, but 
profound as his Umbrian sky. In thinking of him we seem 
to understand the strength that had been hidden beneath the 
sweetness of Fra Angelico and the true mediaeval painters. 



XV 
MELOZZO DA FORLI 

MELOZZO DA FORLI, another pupil of Piero della 
Francesca, is certainly one of the most remarkable 
painters of the Umbrian school. Born at Forli in June 1438, 
if we are to believe his epitaph, formerly in the Church of 
the Trinita at Forli, he lived fifty-six years and five 
months, dying there, as we learn from a manuscript quoted 
in the Commentary on the Life of Benozzo Gozzoli, in the Le 
Monnier edition of Vasari, on November 8, 1494. His work 
is so rare, his legend so scanty, as to leave us with little 
more than the name of a painter who must have been famous 
in his day, painting, as he did, for Pope Sixtus iv., inscribing 
his name in the book of the Academy of St. Luke, of which he 
was one of the original members, Melotius Pi. Pa. — Melotius, 
Painter to the Pope. For Federigo too, the famous Duke 
of Urbino, he painted many pictures, decorating the library 
of the palace at Urbino with representations of the seven Arts. 

That Piero della Francesca was his only master remains 
doubtful at the least. That great painter was not at Urbino 
before 1469, in which year Melozzo was over thirty years 
old ; but that Piero influenced him in his work is obvious to 
any one who will study the few pictures that remain to us of 
all Melozzo's work. We possess none, indeed, which does 
not show the influence of Piero. 

Cardinal Francesco della Rovere was elected Pope with the 
title of Sixtus IV. in 1471, and in 1472 we find Melozzo in 

164 



MELOZZO DA FOELI 165 

Rome. Sixtus iv., famous as the builder of the Sistine 
Chapel, was also notorious for his nepotism. And so it was 
for Cardinal Riario della Rovere that Melozzo painted the 
tribune of the Church of SS. Apostoli. His work was 
destroyed in 1711, but a much repainted fragment — a figure 
of Christ — is in the Palazzo Quirinale to-day, and certain 
figures of angels in the Sacristy of S. Pietro. This 
marvellous fresco represented the Ascension, and the tradi- 
tion of certain feats of foreshortening which Melozzo had 
contrived has come down to us to-day. Something of its 
splendour, its emotion, its moving beauty, may be seen in the 
figures preserved in St. Peter's — two angels playing on 
musical instruments, in which some exquisite emotion seems 
to be expressed, some delicate kind of joy in the return of the 
Prince of Life to His heaven. Certainly we find there a new 
spirit, very different from the isolated and tragic solemnity 
of the work of Piero della Francesca. A graciousness wholly 
Umbrian — something of the ineffable and serious joy of the 
hills and valleys of that land which always seems as though 
it had been especially blessed — disengages itself from these 
paintings. And yet we feel the presence of Piero, if only in 
the bold solution of that problem of foreshortening, in the 
evident interest in the scientific part of painting in a man of 
whom Giovanni Santi, his pupil, sings : — 

' Melozzo, dear to me, 
Who to perspective farther limits gave.' 

About this time Melozzo painted in the library of the 
Vatican, then newly restored by Sixtus iv. and placed under 
the guardianship of the learned Platina, a fresco, now trans- 
ferred to canvas and much damaged thereby, in the Vatican 
Gallery. We see Sixtus iv. enthroned, with Platina kneeling 
before him, while Cardinal Giuliano della Rovere, afterwards 
Pope Julius II., Girolamo Riario, Cardinal Pietro Riario, and 



166 THE CITIES OF UMBRIA 

Giovanni della Eovere, the Pope's nephews, surround him. 
Long attributed to Piero della Francesca, this picture, almost 
more than any other by Melozzo, shows his master's in- 
fluence. In a great and beautiful hall Sixtus sits, while 
Bartolommeo Sacchi, surnamed Platina, kneeling at his feet, 
points to an inscription in which we read of the blessings the 
Pope has conferred on Rome. The two Cardinals, Pietro the 
sensualist, a Mendicant, Giuliano the unimpassioned intellec- 
tual, together with Girolamo, the Lord of Forli (who, it may 
be, brought Melozzo to Rome) and Giovanni, stand beside the 
Pope. Something of that delight which Piero had in paint- 
ing beautiful perspective may be found here too, together 
with an impersonal, unemotional effect very rare in Melozzo's 
work. 

In the little town of Forli, in the plain between Bologna 
and Rimini, where he was born, there still remains one of his 
rare works — the Pesta Pepe. It was originally painted for a 
sign over a shop. We see a figure in violent action beating 
with both arms a heavy pestle in a mortar. The foreshorten- 
ing is astonishing. ' Nowhere, perhaps,' says Mr. Berenson, 
'nowhere, perhaps, as in his renowned "Apothecary's 
Apprentice Pounding Herbs," does painting show such em- 
bodiment of the joy in mere living, the play oif muscles and 
the use of limbs.' 

Melozzo is said also to have painted seven pictures for the 
palace at Urbino in the reign of Federigo. The two pictures, 
now in the National Gallery, representing Rhetoric and 
Music may perhaps be his ; they are ascribed to him, but it 
is doubtful whether they are really from his hand ; while at 
Windsor there is a portrait of Federigo, also given to him ; 
and Morelli speaks of another, which I do not remember to 
have seen, in the Barberini Palace in Rome. But at Loretto, 
in the Chiesa della Santa Casa, Melozzo has painted with a 
certain solemnity, a rare gravity very characteristic of Piero, 



MELOZZO DA FORLI 167 

a series of prophets. It is possible that he studied the work 
of his master here in Loretto before it was destroyed in 1468. 
What those frescoes were which Domenico Veneziano and 
Piero della Francesca painted at Loretto before they were 
driven away by the plague, we shall never know. Vasari 
says they painted the roof of the Sacristy, and that 
Signorelli completed their work. This, however, is impos- 
sible, since Luca Signorelli painted in the present church, 
which was only begun in 1468, while it must have been 
about 1447 that Piero was working in the old church. 

Melozzo da Forli, in comparison with Luca Signorelli, that 
great intelligence, is a painter of deep emotion. There are 
no great ideas in his pictures, nor does his work suggest to 
us that- there was a great intelligence behind it. His 
temperament, deep and strong, carries him away, so that we 
rather feel his intense emotion, his victorious joy, than 
understand his thoughts. Something of Piero's science is 
there, a delight in the difficulties of painting ; but above all, 
we find a triumphant sense of life and movement, a kind of 
ecstasy, a delight in living and moving things for their own 
sake. 



XVI 

LUCA SIGNOEELLI AT ORVIETO 

IN Vasari's life of Luca Signorelli, his kinsman, there is 
perhaps something more than is usual even with him of 
that delight in human nature which is so characteristic of 
this sixteenth-century writer of imaginary portraits. A real 
love and reverence seem to have inspired Vasari with a kind 
of gra^vity as he wrote of this painter from Cortona, who first 
made it possible for him to study Art. It is perhaps chiefly 
as an old man, very noble and quiet, that we remember 
Signorelli after reading those pages ; and occupied as he was 
all his life in business important to Art and to Italy, we 
shall ever think of him as an old man blessing a little child, 
passing his last years among those who loved and honoured 
him, a superb and aristocratic figure, with something of the 
serene sincerity that in that courteous age might be expected 
to surround such an one. 

It is strange that one who in his day was so beloved 
should have been so disregarded in our own. ' In his paint- 
ings,' says Vasari, 'he showed the true mode of depicting 
the nude form, and proved that it can be made, although 
not without consummate art and much difficulty, to appear 
as does the actual life.' And as an artist it is so we must 
regard him really as the rediscoverer of the perfection, the 
sufficiency of the human form, the true master of Michel- 
angelo, who did not scruple ' courteously to avail himself ' of 
his achievements — perfecting them, fulfilling them with his 

168 



LUCA SIGNORELLI AT ORVIETO 169 

own spirit and invincible personality, and so justifying as it 
were the lesser genius of Signorelli by his own devastating 
victory. And so for the most part while we applaud Michel- 
angelo, we forget his forerunner, who has but little philosophy 
to give us ; whose Avork, loyally following that of his master 
Piero della Francesca, is almost impersonal; who was con- 
sumed by no immense sorrow, nor bitterly unsatisfied by 
love, nor overwhelmed by the tragic power of his imagination, 
but a man of quiet days, interested chiefly in his Art which 
he seems to have practised wholly from a love of it; splendid 
in his life, taking much pleasure in clothing himself in hand- 
some vestments, dressing, as the gossip of the time is anxious 
to tell us, always in silk, holding with a certain pride many 
offices in his native city, and especially courteous, as Vasari 
repeats, to all who approached him, both to those who desired 
his works and to his disciples. 

Born at Cortona in 1440, Vasari says that his earliest 
work was done for the Church of S. Lorenzo in Arezzo in the 
year 1472. But of all his work, frescoes and banners and 
paintings in oil, clone in Arezzo, but two remain — a Madonna 
with Saints and Prophets, painted in his old age for the 
Compagnia of San Girolamo, now in the gallery ; and three 
parts of a predella containing the Birth, the Presentation in 
the Temple, and the Marriage of the Blessed Virgin, now in 
the Sacristy of the Duomo. The earliest work of which we 
have any knowledge is now in Milan in the Brera. It is a 
Flagellation painted in oil on a panel, in which we may dis- 
cover easily enough the influence of Piero della Francesca, 
and it may well be, something of Donatello too, in an evident 
desire for the truth as regards the human form. How great 
was the influence of Donatello on Luca Signorelli it is perhaps 
impossible to tell ; other masters, as Antonio Pollaiuolo, for 
instance, may have intervened between the great sculptor 
and that passionate student of anatomy who was to influence 



170 THE CITIES OF UMBEIA 

Michelangelo so profoundly ; but even in so early a picture 
as the Flagellation — early, I mean, in his long life, though it 
was not painted until his fortieth year — we find him occupied 
after all chiefly with the human form, interested really only 
in that, in its vitality, its vigour, its nobility ; so that we 
turn from the almost ignoble Christ to the splendour of the 
two men who strike Him with the knotted cords, or to that 
figure which binds Him to the pillar with such energy, or to 
the young man who stands with half-drawn sword exquisitely 
scornful of Him who bears this shame with so much lowli- 
ness of spirit and humility. And indeed, for Signorelli, 
conscious of his strength, and used rather to inflict such 
punishment than to bear it, there seems to have been but 
little comeliness or beauty in a spectacle so humiliating. 
The profound spiritual insight of other and earlier masters 
was denied him. Of all men of his time he was the least a 
mystic. The subtleties of the soul that appealed so strongly 
to Lionardo da Vinci have nothing to do with him. Some- 
thing of an exquisite and affected elegance we may find, 
perhaps, in the figure of one of the men who, daintily almost, 
swings his body with the blow ; but even here in his earliest 
known picture, it is rather the grandeur of the human body, 
its sufficiency and perfection, that attract him than any 
mystical emotion or great beauty. 

In 1479 we find him appointed to the Council of XVIII. 
in Cortona, and a little later to the Priori and the General 
Council, which oflices he held almost to his death. That he 
was in Rome in or about 1484, that he painted the frescoes 
attributed to him in the Sistine Chapel, the criticism of our 
day is doubtful. But about this time he painted an altar- 
piece in the Duomo at Perugia, which of all the pictures now 
in that city is perhaps the most delightful. Madonna sits 
on a high throne, behind which hangs a garland of flowers ; 
two angels sing in heaven, and around her stand St. John 



LUC A SIGNORELLI AT ORVIETO 171 

Baptist, S. Onofrio, S. Ercolano, and S. Stefano, while seated 
on the steps of the throne a naked angel tunes a lute. The 
almost fantastical realism of this picture is redeemed by 
a sense of beauty at once serene and strong. That angel 
tuning his lute, so unembarrassed by the great saints and 
the very Son of God so near him, seems to embody the 
spirit of all Signorelli's work. The dreams he had ex- 
perienced in Florence, the work of Donatello and Pollaiuolo, 
come to us, how sedately, from amid all the unexpressive 
work in the picture. He has conquered his dreams, and 
has expressed them, and he seems here to have assimilated 
almost everything that he took from his masters, and to 
have had his way with it ; so that the figure of that angel 
is but the first of those legions of nudes that are to come 
from his hand, not all redeemed from their mere strength 
by the power of his genius, but all living often more nobly, 
but never perhaps with more natural life than in that deli- 
cate figure for whom the Madonna waits, till to the music of 
his lute he shall be prepared to begin some exquisite canticle. 
The same or nearly the same figure of Mary may be found 
in the ' Circumcision ' of the National Gallery, but in that 
laboured old picture there is nothing of the lightness, the 
ecstatic perception of beauty, of the delight in physical perfec- 
tion, that we find in the Perugia altar-piece. Just that sort of 
perfection Signorelli perhaps never touched again ; something 
of it, however, with how much more contrivance of joy and 
certainty of touch, together with a serenity of purpose that is 
wanting ever after, we find in the great picture of Pan, now 
in Berlin. That serious, dreamy god sits there enthroned, 
enchanted by the sound of flutes, his vine staff in his hand, the 
crescent moon over his head. Through the dreaminess of the 
summer afternoon, the soft music of the flutes, the beauty 
of those who surround him — that unattainable beauty to 
which he himself, his rude goat feet daintily crossed, can 



172 THE CITIES OF UMBRIA 

never attain — come to him with a kind of sadness ; and while 
one sleeps and another seems to be awaiting an interval in 
which to utter some profoundly beautiful word, Pan himself 
has drifted away into another world, and in his pitiful im- 
perfection has attained to that kingdom of the soul of which 
those around him, with all their perfection, are ignorant. 
Some vision of his own death seems to have come to 
him, and he sees humanity approaching its final success by 
means of his discouragement and decrease, by the passing 
away, the forgetfulness, as it were, of such a day as this, 
such unconsciousness, such serene contentment. His fantastic 
body, and even that too exquisite youth who pipes to him so 
daintily, so precisely, must be exiled from their kingdom ; 
and one day this music, so pleasant now, will be changed 
to weeping, and on a night of a great star and the strange 
unaccustomed voices of angels, little figures distraught with 
grief will be heard wailing to each other, frantic and 
despairing, ' Great Pan is dead, great Pan is dead.' Is it 
the birthday of Christ that he foresees in this golden summer 
afternoon, the sound of the angels' wings, their message of 
goodwill, or only the wind among the reeds, and the 
pleasant, tearful voice of Psyche seeking for Eros ? 

And indeed in the work of even so realistic a painter 
there is more than a little of that strange dream, which 
reconciled Paganism and Christianity, than at first sight 
might appear. Pico della Mirandola, whose fascination even 
Sir Thomas More in sixteenth-century England understood, 
had died in the very year in which the Pan is supposed to 
have been painted. So thoughtful, so superb a man as 
Signorelli, the friend of Lorenzo de Medici (to whom he was 
able to make gifts), must have known of Pico, and even per- 
haps have met him. It is strange at least that in a picture, 
now in the Uffizi, he has painted the Madonna and Child 
surrounded by flowers, and in the background, instead of 



LUCA SIGNORELLI AT ORVIETO 173 

the shepherds, we see four splendid and naked youths, 
almost the very gods themselves, who we may remember 
had taken service as shepherds and goatherds at the coming 
of the new religion. This deep and serious soul who was 
later so exercised by thoughts, not of death, but of the life 
after death, the tragical ending, not without splendour, of 
this beautiful world, may well have been affected by a 
dream so courteous and so delightful as that of Pico della 
Mirandola. 

In 1491 Signorelli was painting in Yolterra, and it is in 
his work still there in the Duomo and the Municipio that we 
find, for the first time perhaps, the influence of Perugino ; 
something more spacious and softer in his work, that is to 
become so pronounced in the Magdalen at the foot of the 
Cross, now in the Accademia at Florence. But it is in the 
Annunciation, in the cathedral at Volterra, that we see the 
influence both of Piero della Francesca and of Perugino, the 
earlier master, with his curiosity as to the science of per- 
spective, the action of light and energy, predominating. 
While at Perugia Luca must often have seen that lovely 
altar-piece which is to-day one of the chief treasures of the 
Pinacoteca ; and here in Volterra he has painted a variation 
of that masterpiece, a variation that is by no means so suc- 
cessful as the picture of his master. For in the strong, 
reticent work of Piero what profound energy — almost pas- 
sionate — he has given to Gabriel ; the angel seems only just 
to have stopped in his flight, to be filled even now with a 
sense of speed, of a great space swept by his wings, a great 
distance overcome by their uplifted beauty. He has fallen 
on his knees with a new energy, and is fulfilled with a 
vitality swift and godlike, visible even in his reticent gesture, 
the arms folded across the bosom, as though to suppress 
some profound joy or excitement. Madonna, under that 
beautiful colonnade, in which we may see all the curious 



174 THE CITIES OF UMBRIA 

scientific knowledge of distance and light that Piero had 
acquired so laboriously and yet so magically, bows in grave 
self-surrender to the command of God. 

How differently has Signorelli conceived of this Annuncia- 
tion of the Prince of Life. A youth of delicate, sexless 
beauty surprises Madonna as she comes, perhaps, from some 
church. He is running towards her, and points with one 
hand towards the sky, while in the other he bears a lily from 
the gardens of heaven. Nor in Madonna is there anything 
of the reticence of Piero, but a certain Peruginesque affecta- 
tion and insincerity. Yet, even as in Piero's picture, she 
stands under a colonnade, but less lovely by far. In another 
picture, now in Florence, painted in his old age, we find the 
same subject treated more successfully. It is a predella, and 
the angel hastens from the mountains across a tiny valley 
towards the Virgin, who is sitting under a porch musing. 
In this predella picture how much freer is the artist, how 
much more himself than in the picture at Yolterra ! 

About the year 1497 we find Signorelli at Monte Olivetto, 
a little monastery not far from Siena. His work there, 
however, was left unfinished, and, if we may judge from the 
overpainted frescoes, ruined and crude as they are to-day, 
can never have really interested him. It is true that now 
and then we catch a glimpse, as it were, of the great work at 
Orvieto, but surely Sodoma has filled the walls with a finer 
knowledge of space composition. Later, we hear of Luca at 
Siena, and then at Borgo San Sepolcro, where he painted the 
Crucifixion now in the Municipio — a somewhat disappointing 
work, laboured and unimpassioned, and yet, by reason of 
some sweetness not to be defined, magical and full of light. 

It is seldom in all his work, up to this time, that he has led 
us to suppose him capable of the great work that was yet to 
be done at Orvieto. ' Unequalled in the art of the fifteenth 
century,' says Morelli of the series of frescoes on the walls 



LUCA SIGNORELLI AT ORVIETO 175 

of the Cappella Nuova in the Duomo of that city, unequalled 
by reason of a certain 'passion, vehemence, and strength.' 
It would appear that it was after severe study in Florence, 
whither he had gone from Siena to see the works of ' the 
living masters as well as those of the departed,' that he 
undertook to paint in fresco the chapel begun fifty-three 
years before by Fra Angelico. In that strange Romanesque 
church, with its superb and astonishing facade in the Gothic 
manner, Luca Signorelli has painted the story of Antichrist 
and the Last Judgment, together with Heaven and Hell, and 
other like subjects. 'He there represented,' says Yasari, 
' scenes descriptive of the Last Judgment, with most singular 
and fanciful invention. Angels, demons, earthquakes, ruins, 
fires, miracles of Antichrist, and many other objects of 
similar kind are depicted in this work, with crude forms, 
varied foreshortenings, and many beautiful figures, the 
master having imagined to himself all that shall go to make 
up the terrors of that last tremendous day. By this per- 
formance the artist enlightened the minds of all who came 
after him, for whom he has indeed greatly diminished the 
difficulties attendant on that mode of representation; nor 
am I surprised that the works of Luca were ever highly 
extolled by Michelangelo, or that for his divine work of the 
Last Judgment, painted in the [Sistine] Chapel, he should 
have courteously availed himself, to a certain extent, of the 
inventions of that artist, as for example in the angels and 
demons, in the divisions of the heavens, and some other parts 
wherein Michelangelo imitated the mode of treatment 
adopted by Luca, as may be seen by every one.' And indeed 
it is only the colour and, perhaps, a rather brutal insight into 
the secrets, the structure, of the human form, which should 
have been redeemed, as Michelangelo contrived to redeem 
it, by a more delicate perception of texture and surface, 
throwing a glamour almost spiritual in its beauty over that 



176 THE CITIES OF UMBRIA 

beautiful and yet pitiful humanity, whose loveliness is after 
all but dust gathered into life for a moment by the smile of 
God, that makes him less than the painter of the Sistine 
Chapel. 

The paintings in the Cappella Nuova begin with the 
Preaching and the Eeign of Antichrist. In the foreground, 
surrounded by every sort of person, he stands upon a marble 
pedestal, speaking to the crowd the words which the devil 
whispers into his ear. This superb and beautiful figure is 
itself a masterpiece ; so beautiful that at a distance we might 
mistake him for the Christ Himself ; on a closer view we see 
the keen and hateful face of the despoiler. At his feet lie 
numbers of golden vessels and heaps of money, with which he 
would cheat the world of what little soul remains to it. In the 
background a beautiful temple stands, with many coming out 
and going in, all armed; while further off we see, as in a 
vision, the coming of Antichrist, hurled from heaven, bringing 
war in his advent, even as Christ shall bring peace. Nothing 
can exceed the conception of this picture in its strength and 
splendour. In a sombre world, from which all joy seems to 
have departed, this tremendous drama takes place, not with- 
out a certain piteous agony. That woman who so reluctantly 
sells herself is but typical of a thousand others who would, 
how gladly, have escaped the hard choice thrust upon them. 
It is not so easy to escape. Where shall she go, for nothing 
is without money and without price 1 What shall she do 1 
she seems to ask herself, as she passionately protests against 
a bargain so sordid as that which he with the lean, eager 
face and the open money-bag offers her. The grave, sweet 
heaven, full of the sunset, serene Avith the last light of the 
day, undisturbed by even the most profound tragedies of 
humanity, seems almost hateful in its calmness and purity. 
And suddenly, into that stainless sky, a mighty angel soars, 
and sweeping earthward hurls the Antichrist into a waiting 



LUCA SIGNORELLI AT ORVIETO 177 

world. In the corner of the fresco, sombre and with clasped 
hands, stand Signorelli himself and Fra Angelico — the one 
stern and almost unmoved, the other sad and full of pity for 
his bright world which has been so spoiled. 

Opposite this fresco Signorelli has painted the Resurrection 
of the Dead. Two angels, mighty and splendid, sound the 
trumpets, from which stream the banners of the Resurrection, 
and the dead stand forth from the grave. All, or almost all, 
gaze upwards towards heaven — some with surprise, some with 
horror, some with a kind of indifference. In one group at 
least we see a remembrance of life in the loving greeting 
exchanged between friends. Luca has dived into the secrets 
of the grave : not content with the unveiled human form in 
its action and beauty, he has here introduced the skeleton, 
horrible and almost obscene, too grotesque for pity ; the 
grinning skull, amid all the beauty of humanity, gazing with 
vacant, empty sockets towards the sky. Next to this fresco 
Luca has painted the 'Damnation of the Wicked.' It is 
perhaps in its movement and passion the finest of the series. 
The devils, almost human and yet so brutish, fight and at 
last conquer the despairing souls of the wretched. The 
human form in every gesture and attitude is realised 
with an energy and an insight almost miraculous. This 
fresco would seem to be continued on the window wall, 
where we see Charon's boat approaching, while the dead, in 
terror, await him on the shore. Opposite to this fresco, 
on the other side of the window, continued on the side 
wall to the Reign of Antichrist, we see the Paradise. On 
the window wall the angels soar, almost like a musical 
melody, as it were, in plain-chant; while on the side wall 
we find a wonderful study of the human form, no longer 
agonised, but serene in every attitude of adoration ; and 
above, the very angels of God. Over the doors of the 
chapel we see the signs of the end of the world, with 
M 



178 THE CITIES OF UMBRIA 

effects of light and shade, as though some celestial army, 
splendid with spears, were marching across heaven, darken- 
ing the world, their swords flashing with the brightness of 
the face of Christ. 

Beneath the technical excellences of these frescoes, their 
qualities of decoration and movement, there lies a magni- 
ficence of intellect and imagination as surprising as it is 
splendid. Luca Signorelli was a kind of poet as well as a 
painter of great achievement and genius. To a genius as 
great in mere pictorial power and strength as Perugino's, he 
adds a power of vision, grave and austere, evidently derived 
to no small extent from Dante, that we shall look for in vain 
in any true Umbrian. He sees the world, life, the human 
body in a new way — a way as different from that of Piero, 
his master, as it is also different from that of Pollaiuolo. 
That great master of movement might perhaps be amazed at 
the power Luca, evidently his pupil, shows even there, so 
passionate, so full of vitality are the gestures, the attitudes 
of his numberless crowds. 

One other great work he left behind him in this chapel — a 
Pieta so lovely that, of all his work, only the Entombment in 
the Duomo at Cortona can be compared to it. A great angel, 
in all the celestial strength of his immortal youth, supports 
the drooping figure of Christ with a tenderness rare in 
Luca's work. 

This great artist, who delighted in living splendidly, and 
loved to dress himself in beautiful garments, was a greater 
man than we have been willing to admit; full of grave 
thoughts and passionate dreams, about which he is so 
reticent that, but for the occasional glimpse of his nature 
which he permits us in his work, we might think of him as 
merely immersed in certain half-scientific studies of anatomy 
and perspective and movement. But we come to under- 
stand at last that he is really a modern, as concerned with 



LUCA SIGNORELLI AT ORVIETO 179 

humanity and thoughts of our world as Michelangelo, one of 
our very selves, who has already shaken off the dreams and 
languor of the Middle Age, the mere excitement and curiosity 
of the early Renaissance, and has attained to our point of 
view, our vision of life and of man. 

Is it, after all, in that picture of the school of Pan, the 
exile and the death of the gods, the shadowy Advent of 
Christ that he wishes to suggest, or some sentiment of 
kinship, of brotherhood with Nature, that, in looking on the 
fields, or the woods, or the sea, strikes at our very hearts '? 
Something of what the Greeks had imaged in Pan, that 
pathetic sweet god, a spirit in the whispering reeds, or the 
wilder places among the rocks, or in the woods, or on the 
mountains, for whom we feel an indescribable emotion, a 
kind of want, a longing so keen, that we know we cannot be 
reconciled at sunset, until we see the stars — or in winter, 
until we have seen the snow. That strange stirring of the 
spirit at the thought of the earth from which we sprang was 
not unknown even in those days. Already it had driven 
Petrarch to the summit of Mont Ventoux, and it was not for 
nothing that St. Francis made his canticles, or Alberti 
said that when he saw the meadows and the hills covered 
with flowers in springtime, his heart was sorrowful; and 
when in autumn he saw the fields golden for harvest and the 
orchards of apples, he felt such grief that many saw him 
weep because of his sadness. The sight of jewels, too, of 
flowers, or of fair landscapes cured him of sickness. And so 
we find Signorelli, who consorted with princes, who was 
loved by Lorenzo de Medici, when he was old, and the men 
of Cortona carried his picture on their shoulders from 
Cortona to Arezzo, during a visit to his kinsman in that 
city, meeting in the house Giorgio Vasari, then a little boy of 
eight years old ; and hearing that he would learn nothing at 
school save how to draw, Luca turned to Antonio, the father, 



180 THE CITIES OF UMBRIA 

and said to him : ' Antonio, let Giorgio learn by all means to 
draw, that he may not degenerate ; for even though he should 
hereafter devote himself to learning, yet the knowledge of 
design, if not profitable, cannot fail to be honourable and 
advantageous.' And turning to the child he said, 'Study 
well, little kinsman.' Then hearing that he was suffering 
from some childish ailment, he bound a jasper round the 
child's neck with his own hand with an infinite tenderness. 
We read, too, that when he lost his son, he would not part 
with him until he had made a drawing of the young body, 
pathetic and beautiful, so that he might remind himself 
every day of a thing so frail, which he had found so precious. 
It is of this man, so reticent, so wise, so tender, that we 
think as we gaze at the frescoes of the Cappella Nuova. He, 
too, seems to have understood the ecstasy and sorrow of 
love, the beauty and pity of life, the darkness of the grave, 
the disillusion that life brings, the exquisite things that we 
have perhaps just missed ; but you will find no rebellion or 
hatred of life or mankind in his work. He understood and 
concerned himself with what he found most beautiful — the 
human form, poetry, music ; courteously faithful to a world 
that was equally unfortunate in so much, and yet so to be 
desired. And when he came to die, it was, be sure, as one 
who had realised already that even that debt too must be 
paid to the utmost farthing ; that the body he had so loved, 
which he had clothed so nobly, and had studied with such 
infinite care, must be compounded once more with the earth 
from which it came, in no ignoble end, but with a certain 
order and momentary tears. 



XVII 

BENEDETTO BONFIGLI 

"I^TOT the least delightful among those earlier Umbrian 
-Ll painters, so scrupulously concerned with religion and 
the beauty of religious meditation, Benedetto Bonfigli would 
seem to have been born in Perugia about the year 1420, some 
seven years before the death of Gentile da Fabriano. A painter 
of but little importance we may think; concerned not so 
much with Art as with the representation of religious truths, 
and almost by chance a kind of historical painter, in the 
Cappella dei Priori, where he has painted so languidly, and 
yet with a certain sweetness — at least in the early frescoes — 
the story of the city as it had come down to him ; the 
wonderfully heroic actions of S. Ercoiano, his life, his 
death, and all the wonders of that distant past. But as the 
master of Perugino, as the only visible founder of that 
school of Perugia which became so famous, which has been 
so beloved, Bonfigli appears to us as a painter of more 
importance than his weak but charming work at first 
suggests. 

Though he seems in his day to have travelled as far as 
Rome and Siena, it is really only in Perugia that we find his 
work. Mr. Berenson mentions an early picture in a private 
collection in London, and he is represented in Berlin and in 
the Opera del Duomo at Empoli ; but beyond these three 
pictures, all his work is still in his native citj^ — in the 
Pinacoteca for the most part, with here and there a standard 

181 



182 THE CITIES OF UMBRIA 

or a panel in the churches, which have rendered their 
treasures to the municipal authorities, one may believe, not 
without a certain sadness. 

The pupil perhaps of Boccatis, who was working from 
about 1435, it is really a glimmer, faint and evanescent, of 
Florentine genius that we see in his work — the influence of 
Fra Angelico and Benozzo Grozzoli, and it may be of Fra 
Lippo Lippi. Among these bright and soft Umbrian hills two 
of those painters have left not a little of their work; and 
in Perugia herself there are still some of their paintings, very 
carefully made on a prepared canvas covered with stucco 
and laid on wood — not the least interesting of their works, 
seeing that they are unrestored. And at Spoleto, at the 
head of that long valley, Fra Lippo Lippi produced the 
most splendid of all his works — the frescoes in the apse of 
the Duomo, where we may see even to-day the Annunciation 
and the Adoration of the Shepherds, and Madonna crowned 
by her Son, very tender, and strong with, vitality, so 
characteristic of Fra Lippo, who must surely have influenced 
the mystical painters of the surrounding cities profoundly. 
But even so early as 1454, when Bonfigli was at work on the 
frescoes of the Cappella dei Priori, we hear of Fra Filippo as 
one whom the Perugians would have liked to engage to 
paint their chapel ; and in 1461 he comes himself to judge of 
the work done there, and praises it. Consider, too, the 
Madonna of the Frate, now in the Uffizi ; how blonde she is, 
how delicate and full of grace her fine modelled features — 
the small, soft chin and wide brow are pure and fair as 
a bright lily before any hand has touched it. And then look 
at Bonfigli's Adoration, and it might seem that her younger 
sister held the Child while the three kings came with their 
gifts to greet Him. Her hair falls in little golden curls over 
her temples, that are delicate and almost transparent in their 
fineness ; and over her hair some dainty lace-work, that has 




THE ADORATION OF THE MAGI 

BENEDETTO BONFIGLI 

From the picture in the Pinacoteca Vanmicci, Perugia 



BENEDETTO BONFIGLI 183 

fallen in so many folds, hardly covers her hair or her slender 
throat. Her wide brow, and the delicate arched brows that 
we find in so many fifteenth-century paintings, are charac- 
teristic of her, certainly the first of her race in Umbria. 

Another painter beside Era Filippo was named in the 
contract of 1454 — to wit, Domenico Veneziano, the master of 
Piero della Francesca. That somewhat vague personality 
moves behind the work of more than one Umbrian, and we 
find him perhaps here too in a certain uncouth vigour and 
robustness so manifest in Bonfigli's Bambini. But after 
all, Bonfigli's masters must, as it seems to me, for ever 
remain unknown. The documents are silent, and what 
gossip of the time we possess would appear to be mis- 
leading.- In the Adoration in the Pinacoteca at Perugia we 
find at least a new personality in Umbrian Art. The draw- 
ing is very weak, the whole picture really just a chance or 
almost accidental combination of colour on the w^all, refined 
upon by an unconscious artist who was anxious about nothing 
save the story he was telling with a certain peevishness, a 
certain impatience. Mark how unamiable she is, that strange 
country virgin ! There is almost the shadow of a frown 
between the pure brows. And those three emaciated child 
angels, how sorrowful they are, how mechanically they 
assume the attitude of prayer ! And in that far country 
across the curious hills that divide us, — is it from Bethlehem? 
— a great army seems to be moving, rushing out of the gates 
of the city with stamping of horses and bright armour and 
spears, and all the splendour of the eve of battle. Never 
again, as I think, is Bonfigli quite so uninitiated, so naif 
in his workmanship; but even here in this picture which 
I suppose, perhaps without sufficient reason, to have been 
among his earliest work, he has not forgotten to crown his 
angels with those strange wreaths of roses, so . artificial, so 
obviously grown in heaven, that we see in all his pictures. 



184 THE CITIES OF UMBRIA 

The frescoes in the Cappella dei Priori, begun in 1454 and 
unfinished at his death in 1496, would seem, since he worked 
at them so languidly, so intermittently, to have been dis- 
tasteful to him. That fresco which begins the series in 
which we see St. Louis of Toulouse standing before the 
Pope, is, to my mind at least, easily the best. Was it 
perhaps after seeing this fresco that Era Lippo Lippi in 
1461 recommended that Bonfigli should paint the whole 
chapel ? One might almost think so. And yet in the fresco 
where St. Louis lies dead surrounded by monks in a church 
which is really S. Pietro in Perugia, how lovely is that 
figure of the kneeling youth, who, unconscious of anything 
but the dead saint, seems to be weeping so passionately ! 

In 1460 Bonfigli is said to have been in Siena, and 
later still in Rome, painting in the company of the young 
Pintoricchio. That visit to Siena, even though it were his 
first — and, remembering his work, I cannot think it — seems 
to have been of some importance to him. A new spirit 
comes into his life, a desire for beauty not divorced from 
religion but as a handmaid of it, as a kind of realisation 
of that song of the beauty of holiness. Something of this 
we see, perhaps, in the picture of the Annunciation in the 
Pinacoteca. Madonna, a little tearful, kneels on a stool of 
beautiful workmanship ; her eyes, just lifted from the book 
of prayers which she holds in her hand, gazing at nothing. 
The angel, dressed in fantastic fashion almost ridiculous, 
speaks his message, while between him and Madonna, writ- 
ing the words which the angel speaks, St. Luke sits on 
his ox, between whose legs is a copy of the Gospel. From 
the Eternal in the Heavens, the Holy Spirit as a dove 
descends with a great swiftness, making a passage of light 
in the soft air. Four child angels, one of a real and natural 
beauty, with outstretched hands watch the work of God. 
Madonna is kneeling just outside the magnificent portico of 



BENEDETTO BONFIGLI 185 

some palace in a kind of courtyard, over the rich walls of 
which we see the tops of the cypresses and the mountains. 
Above is a loggia with carved and' slender pillars. It is 
perhaps in the frieze of the wall whereon Bonfigli has 
painted a sumptuous sort of carving, that we find our first 
surprise. And then something of a larger world seems to 
have come into the picture with the impersonal detached 
figure of St. Luke, who so calmly, almost with a smile, 
writes the unforgettable words. How strange is this dream 
of the Annunciation ! And indeed, long after we have for- 
gotten the mere strangeness of an idea so natural perhaps 
to mystical Umbria, we remember that soft delicate Madonna 
■with the peevish lips and the delicate temples. It is said, 
I know not with how much truth, that in the Adoration 
Bonfigli had introduced the portraits of his sister as the 
Madonna, his nephew as the Child, and his brother as the 
youngest of the three kings. It may be so; but it is 
another woman, younger and more charming, who is so dis- 
tracted by the message of the angel amid all the beauty of 
that Renaissance palace in the Annunciation, and who prays 
with so much simplicity and sweetness in perhaps the most 
beautiful picture of all his work — a Madonna and Child much 
damaged, yet retaining something of the memory of Fra 
Angelico in its simplicity, its spirituality. Who was she that 
was so unhappy, a little wilfully, we may think perhaps, her 
future being so splendid 1 We shall never know. Fra Filippo 
had painted in his pictures over and over again the woman he 
loved. It may be indeed that Bonfigli did so too. How peevish 
she is, how discontented, how delightfully unhappy ! Was 
she, perhaps, his wife who quarrelled with him, so that their 
diff'erences have been noted in the. public records ? Or was 
she just a vision that even to-day, if we are fortunate, we 
may chance to see in that very city ? — something so delicate 
and Avonderful and altogether lovely, that for ever after 



186 THE CITIES OF UMBRIA 

that fierce, rude city seems to have been changed for us ; 
living ever in the memory as some place almost out of the 
world, so that in thinking of her all the tumult of our life 
is hushed, and the soul itself silent in order that all our 
dreams and visions may come to her and be touched by 
her delicate hands and made perfect. For her voice is as 
the sound of distant waters, and our thirsty days are ended 
in a moment when she speaks ; her eyes have looked at 
heaven and remembered the stars, and the sun has lingered 
in the coils of her hair, and her hands are softer than the 
bright lilies which will reconcile us with death at the last. 
I cannot forget the sound of her footsteps or the folds of her 
dress, and the gesture of her hands is a perpetual benediction. 
Ah, how I have envied those she is even now making so 
happy ! for where she is one might say God smiled. At 
home in winter, when the world is hushed by the fall of 
the snow, and the earth made pure again from heaven, I 
have seemed to see her coming, delicate and altogether 
precious, across the spotless fields, her golden hair trailing 
in the night like a shower of stars, her little feet whiter 
than the blossoms of the snow. And when my spirit was 
perhaps stooping under my life, was it not her eyes that 
looked on me and refreshed me, and tenderly lifted up my 
soul, and ever since has she not held it softly in her hands 1 
and I know as I know the sureness of the stars that she will 
not let it fall. 

Those banners which Bonfigli painted to be carried in 
procession, one of which, the Gonfalone di S. Bernardino, 
is now in the Pinacoteca, are almost peculiar to the Umbrian 
school. Another of these strange painted canticles is in 
S. Fiorenzo, and yet another in S. Maria Nuova. The one 
in the Pinacoteca is, however, not the least curious. Above 
sits the great figure of Christ surrounded by angels, while 




GONFAl.ONE DI S BERNARDINO 

BEXEIJETTO BONI-'IGIJ 
From I he fresco in (he Pmacoteca Vaiinucci, Perugia 



BENEDETTO BONFIGLI 187 

below are gathered the priests and people of Perugia, in 
front of the Oratorio di S. Bernardino and the Church of 
S. Francesco, intent on some ritual or service. Between 
our Lord and the people, S, Bernardino himself stands, 
listening to the words of Christ. It is evidently a portrait 
of the saint — the lean, emaciated face still in a kind of 
mystical contemplation. The terrible emotion of the orator, 
from whose lips fell words not of love only but of burning 
scorn and terrifying denunciation, is hushed. His whole 
figure is burning in a kind of ecstasy, he seems like a 
flame almost motionless in heaven. It is said that the people 
gathered together outside the Oratorio di S. Bernardino are 
busied with the ceremony of the blessing of the candles by 
Pope Pius II., which happened in 1459. However this may 
be, surely one of those women who stand so unconcerned 
in the corner of the picture is the Madonna of the Annuncia- 
tion 1 Pale and graceful she stands, still a little unhappy, 
while before her a nun kneels in passionate prayer ; yet she 
is so indifferent that she has almost let her candle fall. 

The banner of S. Maria Nuova is less beautiful, and it 
may be from another hand. Christ between the sun and 
moon surrounded by saints and martyrs threatens the people 
of Perugia with an arrow, while Death mows them down 
with a scythe. The saints appear to be interceding. At 
S. Fiorenzo there is another Gonfalone, also commemorating 
some pestilence ; a long inscription in verse, upheld by an 
angel, prophesies to them in the manner of Jeremiah. In 
Corciano there is another, and indeed the list of those 
ascribed to Bonfigli is long. It is in these banners that 
Bonfigli really ceases to be an artist and becomes a mere 
agent of the Church. Certainly, with the possible exception 
of the one in the Pinacoteca, they can make no claim to 
beauty. It is not in them that we shall find, the master 
of Perugino, but in those pictures, a little bitter and yet 



188 THE CITIES OF UMBRIA 

sweet withal, which have been gathered together from many 
places into the Pinacoteca. Without the passion and the 
profound sense of beauty which Niccold da Foligno possessed, 
and which make him so interesting a pupil of Benozzo Gozzoli, 
Bonfigli yet contrived to give his pictures that suggestion — 
though it is scarcely anything more than a suggestion — of 
sentiment and charm which in Perugino came at last to be 
so loved, which seems to us at times so sickly, so insincere. 
Sometimes his angels are really beautiful, more often they 
are peevish and unhappy, with a kind of childish grief that 
looks almost like a simper on their old young faces. As an 
historical painter, or rather as a painter of tradition, he was 
unsuccessful, evidently feeling himself incapable of telling 
a story or composing in the larger way of Gozzoli. And yet 
there is something golden in his work, something of the soft 
beauty of his birthplace, that Perugino was to turn to such 
good account. In thinking of him one might almost say 
that his chief fault was that he learnt so little from Piero 
della Francesca, or Signorelli, or the Florentines. The father 
of Perugian painting, he gives but the faintest clue to the 
work of Perugino or Pintoricchio ; and though he was born 
in the fifteenth century it is rather as a kind of primitive 
we come to regard him, indifferent alike to Art and to life, 
occupied as he was as a kind of craftsman in the business of 
the Church. 




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XVIII 
FIOEENZO DI LORENZO 

IT is perhaps to the work attributed to a more obscure 
painter that in Perugia we shall turn from the Madonnas 
of Bonfigli or the work of Perugino, finding there something 
that is lacking in these painters — a vitality and energy that 
it had, perhaps, from Piero della Francesca, and a thoughtful- 
ness learned from the Florentines. 

Scarcely anything is known of the life of Fiorenzo di 
Lorenzo ; the contemporary, or nearly the contemporary (for 
it is probable that he was somewhat younger) of Bonfigli, it 
is possible that he was his pupil. But there is a deep and 
simple loveliness in some of Fiorenzo's work that is far 
beyond the cold and heavenly beauty of Bonfigli even at 
his best, as in those children he has crowned with roses and 
gathered round the Virgin and her Son to sing some song 
that, unheard by us, has brought that curiously sweet 
unearthly look into her face. Fiorenzo has forgotten the 
angels in the delight of life and the tragedy of our world. 
In reality he has made the attempt, only to fail at last in 
his successors and pupils, to break through the mysticism 
of the Umbrian school that was even then becoming so 
affected, and to introduce a new motive — life itself, according 
to him, being indeed worthy of immortality. For him the 
sky is almost as luminous and as spacious, at least in his 
youth, as ever it is in Perugino's paintings. Space— it was 
the idea that had absorbed the attention of Piero della 

189 



190 THE CITIES OF UMBRIA 

Francesca, the dream that had led him down innumerable 
vistas of Roman colonnades, the real secret of the beauty of 
his birthplace, as it is of the charm of all Umbria, and, 
indeed, of Italy. And at last, in a man who is absolutely 
Umbrian, we find an appreciation of all that. It was like 
a vision of the aesthetic history of his country — that 
Raphael and Bramante were later to reveal so triumphantly 
to mankind. It was the fundamental idea of the Latin 
genius. How exquisitely that idea of space, as a very noble 
thing in itself, is revealed in Santa Maria Maggiore, for 
instance ! It is as though the very aspect of the world 
here in Italy had been betrayed to captivity ; the very soul 
of sanity apprehended and made visible before the magni- 
ficent mad dreams and visions of the Middle Age had 
tampered with humanity. There is nothing Gothic in the 
Latin genius ; an Italian fails to understand the intense 
individuality, the personal abasement, the betrayal of 
humanism and of man, to be found in a Gothic cathedral; 
to him the grotesques of the French churches would be 
just madness. He under his soft sky is profoundly dis- 
tressed by the thought of the gloom and rain and mist of 
the North. His music is the plain-song; his mystery is 
sunshine. And there he finds, perhaps, a mysticism more 
profound than in the North, with all its obvious groping 
after God in semi-darkness, we shall ever understand. 
Fiorenzo peopled space with sunshine. It was his pro- 
foundest emotion. For ever a-sail in the sky, we find 
those luminous clouds that are like a flight of doves 
hesitating during a single breath, and so still for ever. 
Perhaps, after all, they are in their delicacy and delight 
only the very light itself made visible, half crystallised 
or half turned, magically, into the sunniest vapour, visible 
where all is invisibly visible in the infinite heaven of Italy. 
In the Pinacoteca in Perugia there is a number of 



FIORENZO DI LORENZO 191 

Fiorenzo's works, and yet he is a rare painter. In the 
National Gallery there is a part of an altar-piece, and 
in the Pitti Palace a small Adoration of the Magi, attri- 
buted to Pintoricchio, his pupil, or follower at any rate ; 
in Vienna, in the Academy, there is a tiny Madonna and 
Saints in Glory with worshippers below ; and in Berlin a 
Madonna, also given to him by Mr. Berenson, and out of 
Umbria almost nothing else. 

The beautiful fresco — an Annunciation — on the outside of 
the Portiuncula at Assisi has now disappeared, sold it has 
been said to an American.^ In the Church of San Francesco 
at Deruta, a tiny village on the hills not far from Perugia, 
there is a fresco of SS. Romano and Rocco — a plague 
picture— with a view of Deruta below, dated 1475.^ And 
at Montone, in the Church of S. Francesco, another fresco, 
which Professor Lupatelli gives to Fiorenzo in some small 
part, and that is all. Our study of him, then, is practically 
confined to what has been collected within the Pinacoteca 
at Perugia. 

In the Sala di Fiorenzo di Lorenzo, in the Pinacoteca of 
that noble old hill city, there is a fresco of Madonna with her 
Son and St. Catherine of Alexandria, and a bishop, probably 
St. Nicholas, on either side. It is, even in its ruin, one of 
the loveliest things that Fiorenzo ever painted. The Child — 
always in some way with Fiorenzo the least pleasing figure 
in the picture — is placing the ring on the finger of S. 
Catherine. Round His neck is a necklace of beads, from 
which hangs a charm, a piece of branching coral, as common 
to-day in Italy as in old time. Madonna is seated on a long 
bench, and the wall behind her at one time was evidently 

1 This fresco is now at Fenway Court, Boston, U.S.A. 

2 For an account of this picture, as for much else of interest regard- 
ing Fiorenzo di Lorenzo, see The Problem of Fiorenzo di Lorenzo, by 
Jean Carlyle Graham. Loescher, Rome, 1903. 



192 THE CITIES OF UMBRIA 

elaborately decorated. Christ stands on her knee. In her 
left hand St. Catherine holds a palm branch — her sign of 
martyrdom— and a sword. She is undoubtedly the most 
beautiful figure in the picture. The little fingers of the 
hands of these figures are all curiously bent, a very char- 
acteristic affectation of Fiorenzo's — indeed, I know no 
genuine work by him in which it is absent. The collar- 
bones, too, are prominent in the middle, and a little exces- 
sive and knotted. This beautiful fresco, so much simpler 
and sweeter than much of his work, is free from any horror 
of mysticism or madness of monastic zeal. It is as calm and 
as lovely as an Umbrian evening. The level light of the 
valleys is caught for ever and preserved even in the spectre 
that it has become — a few exquisite and faded colours on 
the wall, where we perceive lovely ghosts smiling at us 
very gently, as though to remind us that, after all, all things 
pass away and nothing remaineth. How far are we in this 
picture from the grotesque affectation and insincerity of 
that other Madonna with the Child and two angels, together 
with four saints ^ (No. 43) in the same room ! Here, though 
the picture is undoubtedly Fiorenzo's, there is almost nothing 
of beauty. Of the four saints St. Peter is almost humorously 
vain and empty ; he holds his keys, and is painted in a very 
characteristic fashion. St. John, on the left hand of the 
Madonna, is scarcely less sincere ; from his head fall innumer- 
able corkscrew curls. Blessed Paolino, to the left of St. John, 
is undoubtedly the finest figure in the picture — he looks out 
at the spectator. On the right of St. Peter, at the other 
extreme of the picture from the St. Francis, is St. Benedict 
with his branch of budding palm, bearing in his hand an 
open book. Madonna sits with her hands pointed in prayer, 
worshipping the Child, who, with His arms folded in an 
ecstasy of affectation, appears to be summing up the eff'ect 

1 Dated 1472. 



FIOEENZO DI LORENZO 193 

he is producing on the spectator. There is nothing to 
redeem the picture from ugliness, save the figure of Paolino 
and, perhaps, the angels ; yet, in spit6 of this, it is intensely 
interesting, even to the aesthetic critic, by reason of its char- 
acteristic handling. Here are all the signs of Fiorenzo, all 
his pet affectations — the curiously pointed ears, almost faun- 
like, the bent little fingers, the high and prominent collar- 
bones, everything, indeed, that marks this picture as his own 
quite apart from any exterior evidence. There remain two 
undoubted paintings by Fiorenzo : one a kind of niche,^ with 
St. Peter and St. Paul on either side, and above, the Madonna 
and Child, with cherubs and angels, which he has signed — 
a beautiful piece of decorative work; the other a triptych, 
a Madonna of Mercy with the Child and two angels. Two 
tiny figures kneel before them in monastic dresses. On one 
side are S. Mustiola and St. Andrew, on the other St. Peter 
and St. Francis. Below is a predella with various saints — 
perhaps S. Bernardino, St. John Baptist, a Pieta, a St. John, 
and others. It is quite a lovely piece of work, a little ruined, 
but still full of beauty and very characteristic. 

It is not, however, in these, the undoubted works of a 
master who bas suddenly become so famous, that we shall 
find ourselves chiefly interested in the picture gallery at 
Perugia ; for saving the first of them they are not remarkable 
for great beauty, and are certainly less lovely than other 
works attributed to him, which we shall now proceed to 
examine. 

'The Nativity,' or 'The Adoration of the Shepherds,' is 
said by Mr. Berenson to be an earlj^ work. Exquisite in 
its charm and in its drawing, it is perhaps a little harsh, a 
little crude in colour. The yellow of St. Joseph's robe is too 
hard and raw for our sophisticated eyes, though certainly 
something may be allowed for the fact that here in a gallery 

1 Dated 1487. 
N 



194 THE CITIES OF UMBEIA 

the picture is subject to a blaze of light that the painter did 
not contemplate. It is, however, in the figure of the Virgin 
that the charm of the picture really lies. A young girl, for 
she is scarcely more, she kneels before her Child whose tiny 
arms are stretched towards her. Her hands are pointed in 
prayer, but she gazes at her only little Son, not as at the 
Desire of all Nations, but as at the Desire of her heart. The 
beautiful soft robe which covers her expresses the lines of 
her slight figure so well, that indeed we are aware of it — 
Turris Eburnea — in all its fragile gentleness, its dainty youth- 
fulness, its perfection. Her hair is coiled behind her neck 
and scarcely reveals the ears, that really are Fiorenzo's own. 
So with every dainty elegance, eloquent of his love, the 
painter, who doubtless loved her, has told us it may be of his 
earliest glimpse of heaven. Behind her many angels, unre- 
garding, sing perhaps ' Magnificat.' The shepherds, three in 
number, kneel behind St. Joseph, a' little surprised that, 
after all, it is no rhetorical splendour of which the angels 
sang. A great dog gazes meditatively from the corner ; and 
Christ, the very Jesus Parvulus, is fallen among the flowers, 
that, as with Persephone, would seem to have sprung up in a 
kind of sudden resurrection of spring at His coming. In that 
magnificent fresco of the Eesurrection at Borgo San Sepolcro 
Piero della Francesca has something of the same idea, in that, 
with the dawn, Spring (who it would appear had for the 
moment hidden her face), suddenly returns, and the trees are 
in leaf and the corn high, and the wild flowers like an army 
of many coloured angels have run down the byways of the 
world. So Christ lies a little child among the flowers — great 
heads of silver dandelion seed, and anemones, and starwort 
— on the skirt of Madonna's robe. 

But I at least should hesitate to give this picture to 
Fiorenzo ; and for more than one reason. Madonna herself, 
certainly the figure upon which most pains have been 




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Z 2 ^ 



FIORENZO DI LORENZO 195 

expended, is utterly unlike anything else of Fiorenzo's. 
Perhaps she is a Florentine with hjer daintiness, and her 
exquisite lines, and her fragile beauty. Fiorenzo's Madonnas 
are too heavy ; the Umbrian girl is not, and certainly was not, 
sufficiently civilised, sufficiently refined for even a painter to 
have evolved from her such a natural daintiness and sweet 
reticence of beauty. Perhaps she is a Florentine not unknown 
to Ghirlandaio, or perhaps Pintoricchio painted her. In his 
work at Spello her sisters, less lovely, but her very sisters, 
gather in quietness, seldom looked at by the stranger, and 
even yet as un"sailgarised as on the day Pintoricchio painted 
them. Moreover, in the gallery in Perugia where she herself 
lives, Pintoricchio has a Madonna at the moment of Annuncia- 
tion, who is her very self painted in a less happy moment, 
when she was tired or a little overcome, or perhaps a few 
years older. It was some one who knew Florence far better 
than Fiorenzo did who painted this 'Nativity'; and, moreover, 
the painter of the ' Nativity ' was also the author, in part at 
any rate, of the ' Adoration of the Magi ' (No. 4), also attri- 
buted to Fiorenzo ; and for this reason : in both the pictures, 
German influence is to be found. In the Madonna of the 
' Adoration of the Magi ' we see, not an Italian girl, for she is 
■without the beauty of any southern land, but the longer face, 
the more ascetic loveliness of the North. Without doubt 
this may be explained by the Van der Goes Triptych, now in 
the Uffizi, which he painted for Tommaso Portinari, the agent 
of the Medici in Bruges. The middle portion of this 
triptych, curiously enough, represents the 'Adoration of the 
Shepherds,' and there lying on the ground is the very 
Jesus Parvulus we see in the Perugia ' Nativity.' But we 
are told that the ' Nativity ' belongs to Fiorenzo's early 
period,^ the 'Magi' to his latest, and we must believe 
therefore that in his earliest and in his latest time he 
^ Berenson's Central Italian Art, pp. 90 and 142. 



196 THE CITIES OP UMBRIA 

remembered Van der Goes, but that in all his most charac- 
teristic work he had forgotten him. It is not open to 
doubt that this picture of Van der Goes had a great 
influence on many painters, • but it would seem to be impos- 
sible that its influence on Fiorenzo was exercised in his 
youth and in his old age, but never in his middle life. It 
seems to me that the ' Nativity,' so slightly characteristic of 
Fiorenzo, may very well be given to Pintoricchio, when in 
his youth he was influenced by, and in all probability the 
pupil of, Fiorenzo. Signor Morelli in his Italian Masters has 
an interesting page on the afiinity between the early work of 
Pintoricchio and Fiorenzo, where he points out certain 
peculiarities in the manner of both artists. And Pintoricchio 
may very possibly have been to Florence, either in the 
company of Perugino or alone, although there is no record of 
such a journey. The 'Magi' has been painted for the most 
part in tempera, though it looks now like an oil painting ; 
parts of it are doubtless in oil, but for the most part it is in 
tempera which has been washed over with oil, possibly by 
the monks with some idea of preserving it. Pintoricchio 
never mastered oil, confining himself to fresco or tempera. 
Both these pictures seem to me to have more of Pintoricchio 
in them than of Fiorenzo, but it may well be they were 
school pictures which Fiorenzo, the master, designed more or 
less, but which were painted by his pupils. 

Fiorenzo, however, would seem to have been a painter of 
a variety of styles, for above the door of the Sala di Fiorenzo 
in Perugia there hangs a most beautiful, though ruined, 
Pieta, surpassing in loveliness and strength anything else 
in the room. It is a little in the manner of Piero della 
Francesca, and the model for the dead Christ may have been 
the same as that, not only for the John the Baptist in the 
altar-piece by Piero in this gallery, but also for the Eisen 
Christ at Borgo San Sepolcro. It is possible, however, that 



FIOEENZO DI LORENZO 197 

Fiorenzo went to school to Piero della Francesca, and that 
there is more than a touch of Piero's hand in this fresco. 
There is another Pieta painted in the manner of the St. 
Catherine, in the Gabinetto of the Perugia Gallery, very 
lovely and very like to the ' Madonna and Child with two 
Saints ' (No. 1), which I have already tried to describe. But 
it is out of all comparison of less account than the Pieta in 
the Sala di Fiorenzo, which, alas ! is so badly hung that it is 
necessary to mount a pair of steps to see it properly. 

It is perhaps, after all, in spite of the beauty of the 
'Nativity,' or the calm and exquisite thoughtfulness of the 
Madonna with St. Catherine and St. Nicholas, to the draw- 
ings that Fiorenzo made in tempera of the Miracles of S. 
Bernardino ^ that we turn almost with relief, as to something 
into which Life, so languid in his religious pictures, steps 
daintily, not without delight. For here, if nowhere else, 
Fiorenzo has escaped for a moment, as we may think per- 
haps, in the company of his pupils, Pintoricchio and others, 
from the sacrifice of experience that religion even in its finest 
expression demands of us. Here in these drawings, exquisite 
as they are and full of joy, he is at last the realist of a very 
fortunate age. His young men, slender and lovely, magnifi- 
cently dressed with a dainty fastidiousness and elegance, 
swagger across his beautiful landscapes where, in all the glow 
of miniature work, the pools of water are just precious stones, 
amethysts or sapphires perhaps, and the skies spaces of 
light set with clouds that are tiny white feat' ers afloat in his 
heaven lost from a cherub's wings in some battle of the 
angels. It is a kind of ideal youth that Ave find there, with 
all the sweetness, the vanity, the confidence, and happiness of 
just that. It is always necessary for us to remind ourselves 
that these young men are but the attendants of a great saint 
who is busied with his miracles. What are miracles to them 
^ One of these panels is dated 1473. 



198 THE CITIES OF UMBPJA 

or to us 1 We care for them for themselves and are willing 
to forget San Bernardino. In one picture of this series of 
events in the life of the saint, where a hound gazes out of 
the picture, there are two youths who, even in their obvious 
surprise and well-bred satisfaction at the miracle they are 
watching, never forget the world and their joy of it for a 
moment, — they are but typical of the painter's work. In the 
same picture is a figure of a kneeling woman, perhaps the 
wife or mistress of the injured man, in whom we see a 
reminiscence of the Magdalen before the Cross in many an 
early picture by Era Angelico or another. The curious 
rocks towering above their own natural arches show us 
for a moment a vision of the later dreams in landscape of 
Lionardo, in their curious shapes, their stalactites, their 
mysterious beauty. One is astonished to find so curious an 
arbour just outside a palace — or a monastery is if? — that 
rises magnificent with marble and brick to the left of the 
picture. 

Are these paintings really concerned with the miracles of 
San Bernardino, or with the most magnificent gentlemen, 
Oddi and Baglioni of Perugia '? And so this effort of flattery 
or realism, softened and made precious by the years, comes 
to us to-day a very vision of ourselves, perhaps, as we were 
three hundred years ago. Here, in the interval that must 
elapse between Birth and Death, Fiorenzo has shown us the 
joyful world too young to be listless, but a little passionate 
with sorrow, a little anxious about love, instinctively beauti- 
ful, as we, alas ! are perhaps instinctively scientific. Great 
passions would be out of place in a world where all is possible, 
seeing that for a few hurried prayers muttered between two 
kisses the good saint will, with all the pride of the city as 
audience, in his profound simplicity save out of the wreck of 
life that which we really desire. Ah, not great passions ! for, 
as Fiorenzo knew, it may be they can never be satisfied ; they 



FIORENZO DI LOEENZO 199 

prey upon us, and at last to them we shall sacrifice every- 
thing and become even as that sorrowful one to whom the 
saint hurries, always a little too late', finding himself not the 
deliverer but one among the musical throng who follow 
that unfortunate one to his grave. And yet in the crouch- 
ing figure, whose golden hair covers her as with a mantle, 
what profound expectancy, what trembling, voluptuous 
sobbing, what certainty of disaster ! Her hair, like old 
• and beaten gold, streams over her shoulders, her attitude 
is about to become more lamentable than Fiorenzo dared 
to draw. She is on the eve of the apprehension of life 
which is so sorry. It is all that the artist allowed himself 
to express of what perhaps he had only apprehended for a 
moment when he had understood how he had failed to paint 
— well, what he desired. 

It was thus by means of a refusal that Fiorenzo, at last 
really alone among his fellows, touched life. The great 
things were beyond his genius, he could by no means trans- 
pose them into art, he fails to give them any reality. But 
with the lesser things, the actual daily exterior life of the 
city, the simple passion of S. Bernardino for doing good, 
the vanity of the young men, their anxiety about this vanity, 
the expectancy of the young women, how successful he was 
— he and his pupils — we see in these few tempera drawings 
that are left us. Perhaps at last he came to think of life not 
as a history but as a piece of poetry, the world being after 
all for him, as for all of us, just himself. " 

His pupils Pintoricchio and Perugino cannot be said to 
have carried on his tradition. In Fiorenzo's mind there ever 
seems to have been a dream which he had not the genius to 
realise. Was it contact with Piero della Francesca that had 
set this dream free in his soul ? We shall never know. In 
his youth it is said he painted well, and in his age he painted 
well ; his middle life appears to have been less inspired, less 



200 THE CITIES OF UMBEIA 

happy at least, in its expression. The reason for this is lost 
to us. We know nothing of his life. Only, as for us so for 
him, the outside world with its elements and forces, its 
fascinating romance, its passions, and disaster, was as nothing 
in comparison with that dream of a world in his own soul 
which he was not able to betray into captivity, and rrom 
which no man could deliver him. 




THli I'RESEPIO 

I'lETKO PEKUGINU 
From the picture in the Pinacoteca Vanmicci, Pems^a 



XIX 
PIETRO VANNUCCI : IL PERUGINO 

IMMERSED, it might seem, in a kind of religious con- 
templation, Perugino appears to us to-day never to have 
emerged from the dreaminess of the Middle Age. In spite 
almost of his masters and the strenuous vitality of that 
Florentine world that influenced him so much, he was an 
ascetic, concerned rather with some ideal dream than with 
the actual world. But his is an asceticism conceived of not 
as strength, never as just that, but as sentiment, an over- 
refinement, as it were ; so that we find him almost shocked by 
the mere exuberance of life, seeking for its less strenuous 
and more quiet moments, and endowing them with a sweet- 
ness that at last becomes wearisome, sickly, almost wilful in 
its deception. The immense intelligence, the clear and 
perfect ' cerebral power ' of his most famous pupil, Raphael, 
he did not possess ; his ideas — if ideas we may call them — 
would seem to have been just monastic thoughts, that with 
him are not quite simple or sincere, a little anaemic through 
loss of touch with the world, a little too pretty and sweet in 
their make-believe. Judging him by his pictures alone — and, 
indeed, how else are we to judge him ? — he would seem all 
his life to have been in a continual reverie, touching actual 
things only once or twice, as in his portrait of Dom Baldassare 
di Vallombrosa, and even then finding them softened for him 
with a kind of glamour of holiness or the nearness of the 
sanctuary, or the strange silence of the monastic life. It is 

201 



202 THE CITIES OF UMBRIA 

only there and in his landscapes, perhaps, that we find any 
reality or loyalty to experience and observation. And yet it 
is not altogether as a sentimentalist that we must think of a 
man whose achievement was .so large, but rather as a kind of 
poet who very easily and simply, and with a kind of natural 
success, had learned from his masters all that they could 
teach him, but was yet imperfect by reason of some want of 
intelligence, a real intellectual feebleness, so that his triumph 
is incomplete, is postponed, till Raphael with his profound 
and perfect scholarship, his immense intelligence, achieves 
the real victory that Perugino had only seen, as it were, 
prophetically. 

Citta della Pieve, where the greatest of the Umbrian 
painters was born about 1446-47, is a little hill-town, 
drenched through and through with the sun and the wind. 
Ruddy and stark on its hilltop, it looks across the uplifted 
plain towards Perugia, crouched like an eagle beneath the 
Apennines. A little dead city, above the silence of the long, 
beautiful valleys, she is really to-day a picture that Perugino 
himself might have painted — has painted, indeed, in many 
a fresco and panel scattered over the world. Only some 
twenty-six miles from Perugia, the capital of the province, 
this little town no doubt had many of her sons employed in 
the city, and so it was to Perugia that Perugino came seeking 
work, so that he might not starve, for he was poor. ' This 
child,' says Vasari, 'brought up in penury and want, was 
given by his father to be the shop drudge of a painter in 
Perugia, who was not particularly distinguished in his calling, 
but who held the art in great veneration, and highly honoured 
the men who excelled therein ; nor did he ever cease to set 
before Pietro the great advantages and honours that were 
to be obtained from painting by all who acquired the power 
of labouring in it effectually.' Who this painter was remains 
doubtful, but it would appear certain that first Bonfigli, and 



PERUamO 203 

later Fiorenzo di Lorenzo and Piero della Francesca, were 
Perugino's masters. Whether, indeed, he had another and 
earlier master than Bonfigli, some altogether unillustrious 
Perugian, who loved good painting rather than practised it, we 
shall probably never know. Morelli suggests that Perugino 
went to Arezzo to assist and to learn of Piero della Francesca, 
who was working there with intervals of other employment 
from 1453 to 1469 ; but there would seem to be no evidence 
other than the work of the two artists to support this theory. 
That Perugino was influenced to no small extent by Piero 
della Francesca is obvious ; but it may be, perhaps, that he 
received no little of Piero's knowledge rather from his pupil 
Fiorenzo di Lorenzo than from the master himself. In 1472 
— Vasari says owing to poverty — Perugino was in Florence, 
where his name appears in the roll of St. Luke. 

It has been suggested by Mr. Berenson, following Vasari 
in this, that while in Florence Perugino came under the 
influence of Verrocchio. It may be so ; and yet his work 
at this time at La Calza seems to point rather to Luca 
Signorelli, another pupil of Piero della Francesca, than to 
that scrupulous, dry Florentine master, who already had 
in his studio a youth who was to come to the highest 
eminence, Lionardo da Vinci. But, indeed, we know 
nothing of his life in Florence. From his earliest youth 
it would seem, if we are to believe Vasari, that painter, 
'not particularly distinguished,' who had been his first 
master, had ever told him that 'Florence was the place 
above all others wherein men attain to perfection in all the 
arts, but especiall}^ in painting.' Vasari also speaks of an 
Adoration of the Magi, in which Perugino about this time 
painted the portrait of Andrea Verrocchio ; but unfortunately 
this work, with the rest in the Convent of the Gesuati, was 
destroyed, together with the church, so early as .1529. 

It would seem that Perugino did not stay very long in 



204 THE CITIES OF UMBRIA 

Florence, for in 1475 we hear of him in Perugia painting 
in the Palazzo Pubblico, but no trace remains of his work. 
In 1478 he was in Cerqueto, where there remains a figure 
of S. Sebastiano, painted by him in the manner of Luca 
Signorelli ; and, indeed, Vasari speaks of a host of pictures 
by him which have since disappeared, painted in Florence 
or its neighbourhood, whereby he seems to have gained 
reputation beyond the ordinary, so that in 1480 Sixtus iv., 
della Rovere of Urbino, invited him to Rome to paint in 
the new chapel he was building in the Vatican, which he 
desired should be decorated by the first artists in Italy. 
And it is here in the Sistine Chapel that for the first time 
we find the true Perugino, the painter of space and light ; 
just there, indeed, the true pupil of Piero della Francesca, 
and yet successful in this effect of spaciousness in a new 
way almost, magically filling his picture with air so that 
the sky is no empty void, but fulfilled with light, deep and 
limpid and clear with the golden, serious beauty of heaven. 
It is ' The Delivery of the Keys to St. Peter ' that he 
paints on the wall with a new effect of outdoor life, the 
pleasant freedom, the splendour of all that, putting into it 
by reason of its spaciousness, it may well be, a really reli- 
gious effect, a sense of God. And it is just there we touch, 
perhaps, Perugino's magic. That clear yet soft landscape, 
wider than the sea, between the gracious gesture of the 
mountains east and west, serious by reason, perhaps, of 
their grave influence, their serene loveliness ever lifting 
up the eyes of man to the soft sky, seems even to the 
most inattentive traveller to be blessed. Something gracious 
seems to have fallen on it, a new light is in the valleys 
and on the mountain-sides, a light that never was on any 
Tuscan hills. Something of the lives of the saints seems to 
have expressed itself in the attitude of Nature, for temperate 
beauty has sweetness here in a land that is a little ascetic, 



PEEUGINO 205 

and yet not cruelly so — a land of dreams truly, yet through 
which the Tiber rolls towards Eome. And it is just this 
effect of something blessed that Perugino, almost a realist 
for once, has caught in his picture in the Sistine Chapel. 
He paints many another landscape lovelier by far, and full 
of a clearer air, jewelled with waters, and touched, as it 
were, by a serener light, so that his effect is often more 
religious than here ; but in this, his only fresco in that 
chapel of Sixtus iv., we see for the first time the splendour 
of that space, that art of composing with space which later 
Perugino brought so near to perfection, and through which 
Eaphael expressed his most profound thoughts. And, above 
all, this creation of space had for its immediate effect a kind 
of religious consequence; it was in itself an expression of 
G-od. Mystical Umbria had spoken her secret thought that 
had inspired so many saints whose lives were, perhaps, 
merely magical to the world. Here, at last, in language 
which forced the world to its knees, she told her thought 
and her dream in the work of Perugino. It seems ever to 
lift up the eyes past the fragile and sorrowful figure in the 
foreground to the soft sky, so splendid, so lovely, and so 
deep, where God is, behind that visible air, with all His 
saints. 

It was not till 1491 that Perugino, after many disappoint- 
ments in Orvieto and in Florence, was in Eome again, this 
time at the invitation of Cardinal Giuliano della Eovere, 
afterwards Pope Julius ii. There he painted the altar-piece 
in the Villa Albani, in which the influence of Piero della 
Francesca seems so obvious. In the midst he has painted 
the Nativity under one of those beautiful colonnades that 
Piero had almost invented. Madonna, who kneels before 
the Child on the ground, is even in feature very like to 
the Madonna of the Nativity in the Perugia Gallery attri- 
buted to Fiorenzo di Lorenzo. And yet how different from 



206 THE CITIES OF UMBRIA 

that somewhat hard and dry old picture is the exquisite 
world Perugino has painted. Miles and miles away lies the 
vistaed earth, and the sky is full of air and light ; in the 
shade of the colonnade two angels kneel between the kneeling 
figures of Madonna and St. Joseph ; on either side, in separate 
compartments, kneel the soldier-saints, perhaps St. George 
and St. Michael, or St. Gabriel, while on one side stands 
St. John Baptist, and on the other some aged man. Above, in 
other compartments, are the Crucifixion and the Annunciation, 
the angel and Madonna, both kneeling under the beautiful 
cloisters of the Temple, perhaps. And it is just here we 
find Perugino doing what his masters Piero della Francesca 
and Fiorenzo di Lorenzo had tried to do— and doing it very 
much better. He has not the vitality of Piero, but he has 
learned perspective and all the entrancing magic of vistaed 
colonnades from him, and yet has subordinated them to the 
purpose of the whole work. How much more beautiful is 
his handling of the picture as a piece of composition than 
that of Fiorenzo ; and yet in spite of their evident presence 
here how entirely his own is the whole picture ! He has 
gone one step beyond Piero, and has understood perspective 
as not merely a material element of pictorial beauty, as not 
merely a mathematical problem, but as a spiritual element 
of thought and passion. What is all this space and light, 
this heaven full of air, but a kind of perspective, a compre- 
hension of the largeness of the evening sky and earth 1 And 
it is as just that, that Perugino has understood it. He goes 
on painting this new heaven and new earth during his whole 
life, till we see that it is true, that it is just what we have 
been looking at down every Umbrian valley, but have not 
really understood till now. When he leaves this spiritual 
world that has been revealed to him and turns to figure- 
painting it is no longer the world that he sees, no longer 
reality at all, but certain dreams of perfection, too soft and 



PEEUGINO 207 

sweet for truth, a little sentimental, as we might say of one 
who desired rather to express an imaginary emotion than 
the truth. It is thus we think of him when we look at that 
altar-piece now in the Uffizi, which he painted at Fiesole in 
1493. Madonna sits a little abstractedly with the Child on 
her knees ; a languid figure, fragile and tearful, stands on 
her right as St. John Baptist, while on her left a beautiful 
St. Sebastian looks towards heaven, and though the arrow 
has pierced his soft flesh, he stands so elegantly and is so 
immersed in his prayer that he has not noticed it. Well, 
it is in such subjects that Perugino is least great. How 
insincere are all the figures, how merely charming, how senti- 
mental ! And yet how well he has composed the picture so 
that it Is by no means crowded, but perfectly constructed, 
and with quite simple means. Throughout the whole of his 
life he had been a wanderer, coming to Perugia as a child. 
He had lived in Florence, in Eome, in Siena, and in many 
a tiny Umbrian city, and in 1494 he seems to have gone 
to Venice. A picture in Cremona of Madonna and Child 
enthroned with two Saints may well have been painted on 
his way to or from the great sea city ; but in the following 
year he is back again at Perugia, being nearly fifty years 
old, painting there an altar-piece for the Cappella dei Priori, 
now in the Vatican. About this time, too, he visited, it may 
be for the first time, the little town of Borgo San Sepolcro, 
the birthplace of his master, Piero della Francesca. Piero 
had painted there in the Palazzo dei Conservatori his 
wonderful fresco of the Eesurrection, but in the picture of 
the Ascension by Perugino we find no suggestion of any 
influence which such a strange and almost startling work 
may have had on him. More artificial than usual, weaker, 
and really a kind of splendid illumination, a huge miniature, 
this Ascension has nevertheless something of his magic, if 
only in that far-away landscape with the delicate trees so 



208 THE CITIES OF UMBRIA 

clear against the sky, and the loveliness that is not beauty 
but serenity — a charm in everything which he so seldom 
fails to give to even his most insincere work. 

To this year too belongs the beautiful ' Entombment,' now 
in the Pitti Palace, in which we find a certain enchanting 
seaside and far-away mountains. Is it really the sea or 
only a memory of the lake of Perugia, Lake Thrasymene, from 
whose banks many a fair town climbs up the hills, just as 
Perugino has painted the little city in this picture. In the 
foreground we find one of his best pieces of composition — the 
dead figure of Christ, framed by that little sorrowful company 
which is come to bury Him. And indeed we may say that it 
was at this period of his life that he produced his greatest 
religious works, for in 1496 the fresco of the Crucifixion in 
the Chapter House of S. Maria Maddalena dei Pazzi was 
finished. This beautiful fresco, certainly one of the loveliest 
dreams of that life so full of dreams as to be almost wilfully 
indifferent to life, is very characteristic of his work at 
its best. Coming to it through the shadowy street of 
Florence early in the morning, in the company it may be of 
some beloved friend, whose serene and quiet spirit has 
occupied our thoughts on the way through the noisy streets 
to this little church, so hidden away out of sight, we seem to 
understand Perugino, his aim in Art, his spirit, his content- 
ment with just that poetical, mystical expression of the 
serenity of heaven and earth, the holiness of just that, as 
never before. It was indeed thus that I came with one who 
is now making others happy, whom I have never seen. 
Something, I know not what, in the fresh perfection of the 
morning, or the quieting presence of that perfect comrade, 
seemed to have prepared me for a vision of all that I 
apprehended in the calm, quiet beauty of the morning and 
the perfect satisfaction, the contentment, I had in the society 
of my companion. And indeed it is just that, which 



PERUGINO 209 

Perugino has expressed in the fresco of S. Maria Maddalena 
dei Pazzi. The fresco is divided into three compartments, 
each framed by a beautiful round arch. In the midst, in a 
country of little hills more delicate than anything we have 
ever really seen with our bodily eyes, in a kind of heavenly 
landscape Christ hangs upon the Cross, while St. Mary 
Magdalen worships Him. To the right and left, in the same 
exquisite country of delicate streams and trees that the softest 
wind would make musical, the Blessed Virgin and St. John 
the Evangelist stand, while two other saints kneeling adore 
the crucified Saviour. There are but six figures in the whole 
picture ; and it is just this spaciousness, perhaps, earth and 
sky counting for so much, that makes this work so delightful. 
Another Crucifixion which he painted about this time, now in 
the Academy at Florence, seems to confirm one in the thought, 
in the theory of the real spirituality of that sense for space 
and air and all that is meant by 'space-composition,' which 
are so exquisitely insisted upon in the fresco in the Chapter 
House of S. Maria Maddalena. For here all that serenity 
and perfection is wanting, and we find instead a kind of 
affectation of all that was so perfect in the first picture. 
Painted for the Convent of St. Jerome, it was necessary to 
introduce that saint and his lion — that strangely pathetic 
creature that looks at us so sentimentally, so full of embarrass- 
ment, from many an old painting up and down Italy. 

In two pictures, both in the Perugia Gallery, one of 
Madonna and Child, painted in 1497, the other of St. Francis 
and S. Bernardino interceding with Madonna on behalf of 
Perugia, we see, as it seems to me, the first glimpse in 
Perugino's work of that fantastical, elegant spirit, which has 
done so much to hurt his reputation. It is not that this 
spirit was nowhere in his work before, but that in these two 
pictures — in one of them at any rate — it would seem to have 
obtained supreme command. How insincere are those angels 




210 THE CITIES OF UMBRIA 

that caper so elegantly with such conscious grace about 
Madonna, and how impossible are those cherubim that star 
the ' Intercession of St. Francis ' ! Perugino, who had taken 
Piero for his master, has here wandered so far from him, that 
we could never guess while looking at these works that he 
had ever come under his influence. The serious purpose, 
the thoughtful dramatic art, of the great painter of S. 
Francesco at Arezzo have disappeared from Umbrian Art, 
and instead we find a kind of reaction towards that older 
manner, pictorial and entirely decorative, an art in the service 
of religion, very pretty and thoughtless, and concerned with 
the emotions. Not passion, but a superficial kind of charm ; 
not the beauty of holiness, that mystical beauty which we 
find so profound in Angelico, but the dainty piety of beauti- 
ful women, who spare a few languid, insipid hours for 
Madonna in all the exquisite days. Something of the same 
spirit, and yet with a real and live beauty upon it that 
is wanting in the two Perugia pictures, we find in the 
great altar-piece in three compartments, in the National 
Gallery. But here we find something new also. That 
dainty, effeminate, and yet sturdy figure of St. Michael is the 
forerunner of a whole company of youths and captains, the 
dream warriors of the Cambio, which seem so charming, so 
unreal, and yet so characteristic of the later Perugino. It 
was about the year 1500, when Perugino was more than fifty 
years old, that the Priori of Perugia begged him to decorate 
the Cambio. He would seem to have agreed with no little 
gladness and pride. To-day as we enter that somewhat 
gloomy chamber, so bare and yet so full of the fantastical 
thoughts of the Eenaissance, it is the real Perugino we see, 
perhaps the most characteristic of all his works, on ceiling 
and wall. And, indeed, it is true Eenaissance work that we 
find there, less virile than the Florentine, less subtle, and 
softer too, with still a suggestion of the sanctuary about it. 



PERUGINO 211 

the quietness of a holy place, the languor of the Gregorian 
chant, the delicacy of the fine vestments and altar clothes, 
antiquity seen with all the affectation, the daintiness, the 
make-believe of the Renaissance, with something of its naive 
admiration at itself, and its whole-hearted worship of antique 
captains and old philosophies. 

They are no Romans nor Greeks, these fragile warriors 
with the sweet boyish or even girlish faces, the round limbs 
and delicate hands. They have never heard of Ares or 
Mars; to them the brightness of Apollo, the beauty of 
Aphrodite, have not been revealed ; only they have under- 
stood the beauty of the delicate wounded hands of Christ, 
the sorrowful dreams of Mary Madonna, the fatal and 
fantastic- lives of the saints, the ecstasies of the mystics, the 
eloquence of the preachers. They have not been born into 
the world with the Aphrodite of Melos, the mother of Love, 
but with Mary Madonna, Mother of God ; and though God 
be Love, and she His mother, it is of the salt of her tears they 
have tasted and not of the salt of the sea. They seem to 
cry for some memory of their greatness to linger with us on 
the way to death, and almost in pity we are eager to 
remember them. But, indeed, they have never existed, 
these delicate, sorrowful Christians that masquerade as 
Greeks and Romans ; they are the dreams of a fortunate 
age in the midst of misfortune ; they are pale sunbeams on a 
winter's day, ghosts of some golden age in heaven that never 
' came to our earth ; already they are fading on the wall, 
and even while we look they seem to pass away like some 
exquisite fantastic dream. Endowed with all the ideal grace 
and humility of Christianity, they seem to tell us of an age 
of chivalry that never happened :- Thermopylae passed by 
them in a dream, Aspasia was but a vision seen in some 
convent on a day of spring, Hannibal is a tale that is told, 
and Carthage a city in a Book of Hours. 



212 THE CITIES OF UMBEIA 

How differently Signorelli would have dealt with his ideas, 
how little poetry he would have found it necessary to bring 
to an antiquity in itself so splendid, how little sentimentality 
he would have thrust upon the greatest soldiers of the 
Avorld ! Was it, perhaps, that the Perugians in their fierce 
and brutal city needed some such fanciful emasculated dream 
as this to reconcile them with their own world 1 Was this, 
too, an expression of the dreaminess, the mysticism of 
Umbria 1 Was Perugino painting merely for his public 1 
Indeed, I think he painted here in the Cambio more for him- 
self than in many a scornful religious picture. This man 
with the rugged, scornful, indifferent face, that looks at us 
in this very room, was a dreamer, a poet, a man of emotions 
rather than a thinker. Taught by Piero della Francesca 
certain lessons in the science of Art, all his life he remembered 
them, but does not carry that science any further ; is indeed 
only interested in it when he can find a spirit, poetical, full 
of dreams, and a world of dreams that may be expressed by 
it. So he takes the knowledge that Piero had given him, or 
develops it, not as Signorelli did, intellectually, scientifically, 
in the true manner of Piero, but in a way entirely his own, 
applying perspective with all its intricate problems not to 
the works of man only but to the creation of God. How he 
has planned out heaven and earth in spaces of light full of 
air and sunshine ! We shall do wrong if we think of his 
work as an expression of anything but just that emotion. 
His subjects he might seem to have thrown to his public 
with a certain scorn, content if he might express his love of 
heaven and earth. He thinks of Nature so far as he caught 
sight of her, not as a being like himself, as Wordsworth did, 
but as the spirit of God. It is perhaps that which we find 
so delightful in his work, so that even when his sentimen- 
tality, his insincerity, his love of sweet, tearful faces, his 
reiteration of affected sorrow disgust us, we still find his 




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PERUGINO. 213 

work jeligious in the true sense, by reason of a certain 
spirituality that lurks behind those theatrical sorrows of 
saints and martyrs. For us at least, initiated as we are by 
our own souls into the genuine and lonely sorrows of the 
world, it is rather as the painter of Italy, of all that Italy 
means to us, than as a painter of religious pictures that 
Perugino appeals to us, and, in a sense, that would make him 
one of the most religious painters of the world ; for it is in 
the beauty of the world, its joyful summer iields, its uplifted 
hills and the soft sky we have learned to love so passionately, 
that we find the best expression of all that we mean by 
religion. Not Paganism, but an apprehension of the presence 
of God in His unspoiled work — work which He Himself found 
so good, which He gave us, too, not to destroy but to enjoy 
and to cherish, seeing that it must remind us, how inevitably, 
of Him. 

Those delicate warriors that stand at attention so languidly 
in the Cambio seem to have haunted Perugino for some 
time. We see perhaps the first of them in the St. Michael 
of the National Gallery altar-piece, and the same figure 
appears in a picture of the i\.ssumption, now in the Academy 
at Florence. Indeed, those four figures, who look so 
languidly and with such unction towards Madonna as she is 
carried upward, rather by some irresistible force within 
herself than by the angels, who merely point towards God in 
His Heaven, are but four more of the isolated figures of the 
■Cambio. Splendid in their beauty, they are of the same 
company, and yet how real beside those dreamy Eomans and 
Greeks. Something of the unction of the earliest Latin 
hymns inspires them — naturally enough, one might think, 
seeing that they are at one with the" subject of the picture. 
In the same gallery at Florence we may see the two portraits 
that Perugino painted about this time, of the Abbate 
Baldassare and of Dom Biagio Milanesi of the Vallombrosa. 



214 THE CITIES OF UMBRIA 

At last, in these two portraits he has touched reality very 
successfully, and it may well be that some will consider these 
portraits his greatest works. Simple and without the 
smallest accessories, they show us that for one moment at 
any rate Perugino touched life and found it beautiful. But 
it was not in any ordinary human being, full of thoughts of 
the world, that he came at last to consider the life of man, 
the realities of the world, but even here too in a man 
touched by the simplicity, the chaste, lowly ways of the 
monastery. It was perhaps the only way in which a mind 
so affected, so shy of reality as Perugino's, could approach 
reality at all ; and these two portraits remain to show us how 
simply he dealt with anything he could not utterly trans- 
form with his own spirit, could not make his own and 
endow with the emotions of his own mind. 

In the following year, 1501, he was elected one of the 
Priori of Perugia, and we find him painting not long after- 
wards four saints and two angels, together with a lovely 
landscape of hill and river, round a monstrous wooden 
crucifix, whose terrible wounds and emaciated humanity 
horrify us even to-day in the Perugia Gallery. The double 
altar-piece in the same gallery would seem to be rather the 
work of his pupils than his own ; and indeed the rest of his 
life is a kind of fading repetition of all his former glory. At 
Florence, in 1503, he helps to choose the place where Michel- 
angelo's David shall stand, is outvoted, and his opinion is 
disregarded ; and because of this perhaps he returns to his 
own land, Umbria, famous now because of him; returns, 
indeed, to his very birthplace, Citt^ della Pieve, and paints 
there in the following year the Adoration of the Magi, 
almost for love, since he knew they were too poor to pay the 
cost. You may see it to-day in all its ruined splendour ; in 
a more fantastic landscape than he ever painted before, and 
with a new effect of light streaming as from the gates of 



PERUGINO 215 

Heaven down the long valley, the three kings and their 
company come to worship a little Child. It is a kind of 
allegory of his own life, that had been almost as splendid as 
a king's progress, and yet always full of devotion to so 
spiritual a thing as earth and sky. But all his splendours 
were not finished, for in that same year he received a letter 
from Isabella d' Este, Duchess of Mantua, minutely describ- 
ing a picture she wished him to paint. She had long 
desired Perugino to work for her, and when at last he 
consented, it was not a Madonna or any Holy Family she 
asked, but a battle between Love and Chastity ; Pagan in the 
manner of the Renaissance, full of a kind of romance. 

*My poetic invention,' she writes, 'which I wish to see 
you paint, is the Battle of Love and Chastity — that is to say, 
Pallas and Diana fighting against Venus and Love. Pallas 
must appear almost to have vanquished Love. After breaking 
his golden arrows and silver bow, and flinging them at her 
feet, she holds the blindfold boy with one hand by the 
handkerchief which he wears over his eyes, and lifts her 
lance to strike him with the other. The issue of the conflict 
between Diana and Venus must appear more doubtful. 
Venus's crown, garland, and veil will only have been slightly 
damaged ; while Diana's raiment will have been singed by 
the torch of Venus, but neither of the goddesses will have 
received any wound. Behind these four divinities, the chaste 
nymphs in the train of Pallas and Diana will be seen engaged 
in a fierce conflict — in such ways as you can best imagine — 
with the lascivious troops of fauns, satyrs, and thousands of 
little loves. These last will be smaller than the god Cupid, 
and will carry neither gold bows nor silver arrows, but darts 
of some baser material, either wood or iron if you please. 
In order to give full expression to the fable and adorn the 
scene, the olive tree, sacred to Pallas, will rise, out of the 
ground at her side, with a shield bearing the head of Medusa, 



216 THE CITIES OF UMBRIA 

and the owl, which is her emblem, will be seen in the 
branches of the tree. ... I send you all these incidents in a 
small drawing, which may help you to understand my 
explanations. If you think there are too many figures you 
can reduce the number, so long as the chief ones remain~I 
mean Pallas, Diana, Venus, and Love — but you are forbidden 
to introduce anything of your own invention.' It was thus 
the great religious painter of the age was asked to paint a 
subject which could never have suited a genius so mystical, 
so little interested in action. But he finished the work, and 
we may see it to-day in the Louvre. Full of a kind of 
movement, its mere carelessness, its mixed perspective, show 
how little he cared for work into which he was forbidden 
to introduce ' anything of his own invention.' 

Later, in Eome, painting in the Stanze at the command 
of Julius II., meeting there Signorelli and Pintoricchio, both 
so famous, he worked with a certain enthusiasm, and 
indeed his work in the Stanza del Incendio is delightful 
even beside Raphael. On his way back to Perugia, he 
would seem to have stayed at Assisi, and to have painted a 
Crucifixion, now spoilt, in S. Maria degli Angeli. But 
perhaps the loveliest work of his old age is in his birthplace 
in S. Servi. Ruined though it be, it still holds something 
precious for us in a new kind of sincerity in that last vision 
of the Crucifixion. Later still, we find him painting at 
S. Agnese in Perugia, and at Trevi ; and again, with a kind 
of humility, completing a fresco that his pupil Raphael, then 
so famous and so lately dead, had left unfinished in S. Severo 
at Perugia. 

He himself was not far from death, which came to 
him, as it is said, in the plague of 1524. A certain mystery 
shrouds his burial and all concerning it. Vasari says that 
he was buried honourably at Citta della Pieve ; but a later 
gossip asserts that he died at Fontignano, without receiving 



PERUGINO 217 

the last sacraments of the Church, and so was buried in 
unconsecrated ground. This assertion has been used to 
prove Perugino's irreligion, which it would seem is a question 
scarcely worth discussing. It appears unlikely that the 
Church would have employed an atheist to represent for her 
so many of the most touching scenes in human life, and 
in the life of Christ, and then have refused him burial at 
last. And indeed, in thinking of so quiet an artist, it is not 
necessary to come to any such conclusion. In a sense the 
most religious painter Italy ever produced, it is rather as a 
painter of earth and sky, of space, and of all that space 
came to mean to him, that he interests us. Not content with 
any description, as it were, of the Nativity or the Crucifixion, 
subjects so full of the exquisite tragedy of heaven, he desires 
rather to suggest the very spirit, the serene beauty, of the 
presence of God, and to allow his thoughts about the world 
to disengage themselves from his pictures. He was the first 
painter perhaps who cared for the soft sky, finding there 
something precious, which we too have seen because of him. 



XX 

PINTOEICCHIO 

IN Yasari^s Lives of the Painters but little space is given to 
the life and work of Pintoricchio, and although we have 
come to think of him as a painter of some' interest and 
importance, since the discovery of his work in the Sistine 
Chapel for so long given to Luca Signorelli and Perugino, 
we shall do wrong to claim for him more consideration than 
he really deserves ; at his best he is but a third-rate painter. 
So, while as an Italian painter of the Eenaissance he may be 
disregarded almost, as an Umbrian, or a follower of Perugino 
and the pictorial school of Central Italy, he still has his 
importance,, seeing that he has much of the charm, the 
prettiness, which, one half believes, have made Perugino so 
popular ; while he is almost without the greater qualities of 
his master, whose real development is to be found, not in 
Pintoricchio, but in the Raphael of the Stanze, and in such a 
picture as the Madonna del Granduca. 

Born, as is supposed, in Perugia in 1454, he was at most 
but eight years younger than Perugino. At his christening 
he was given the name of Bernardino, not an uncommon 
name we may believe in those days, when the memory of 
S. Bernardino of Siena, full of tears and passionate eloquence, 
still haunted the piazzas of Perugia. Little, poor, and deaf, 
if we are to remember his first nickname — il sordicchio — he 
was very evidently a youth of great promise — a promise 
which was to come so early to performance, and so soon to 

218 




MADONNA 

BERNARDINO I'lN 1 UKICCHK i 
Frotn the fresco in the church of S. Maria Maggioi-e, Spello 



PINTORICCHIO 219 

fall into a kind of weakness ; a delight in just pretty things, 
delightful enough in themselves — pretty women, pretty 
landscapes, and all the life of the animal world, so naive and 
charming ; the sweetness of the flowers, too, tall lilies, or the 
wild flowers that are scattered over the fields, together with 
something of Bonfigli's love for surprising or pretty costumes 
or dresses. How carefully he notes the folds of a girl's 
gown, or the glint of chain armour on some exquisite youth, 
or the jewelled splendour of pontifical copes, and all the 
daintiness of fairyland in the Borgia apartments ! And 
indeed it is not seldom we seem to find Bonfigli and Fiorenzo 
di Lorenzo as his earliest masters. For if it was from 
Bonfigli he learned the charm of the fashionable costume of 
his day,- it was perhaps from Fiorenzo he learned the 
necessity of making his women so pretty ; pretty after one 
pattern almost. How like to the innumerable virgins, and 
the gayer, more happy girls of Pintoricchio's pictures at 
Spello, at Eome, at Siena, is that Madonna of the Nativity 
attributed to Fiorenzo di Lorenzo in the Perugia Gallery ! 
And yet when we find Pintoricchio painting for Sixtus iv. in 
the Sistine Chapel, it is almost as an independent painter, 
a painter whose work has for many years been mistaken for 
that of Signorelli or Perugino. We know but little of 
Pintoricchio at any time of his life, and nothing at all before 
the time of the frescoes in S. Maria in Aracoeli and in the 
Sistine Chapel. It is strange, considering the importance of 
the Florentine school of painting, its excellence, its vitality, 
to find so much Umbrian work in the Sistine Chapel. But it 
is well to remember that Sixtus IV. was della Rovere, an 
Umbrian of Urbino; that Melozzo da Forli, the pupil of 
Signorelli, was a man of no little importance in Rome ; and 
that for these reasons, even apart from the excellent fame 
of Perugino, Umbrian Art would receive favour and con- 
sideration. However that may be, we find Pintoricchio at 



220 THE CITIES OF UMBRIA 

work in Rome so early as 1482, and ten years later he has 
begun the Borgia apartments. His work in the Sistine 
Chapel — two frescoes, the Baptism of our Lord, and the 
Journey of Moses — might seem, even with all the rest of his 
work to choose from, the best he ever did. In a landscape 
full of great rocks in whose crevices grow many a delicate 
tree, in the manner of Fiorenzo, Pintoricchio has painted 
certain scenes from the life of Moses. In one corner of the 
picture a great valley steals away between soft mountains, 
and in the foreground a host of people is assembled, 
shepherds and children, and many women and a bright 
angel. Zipporah is intent on the ceremony of ' circumcision, 
while Moses, a figure so like to Christ as almost to be 
mistaken for Him, looks on, a little sadly. Again we see 
this figure stopped by an angel who seems to be delivering 
some urgent message. A little further off shepherds dance, 
and a company is assembled as though for some ceremony, 
a marriage or a funeral. Long given to Luca Signorelli, 
there is, to our eyes at any rate, but little of Luca's strong 
work in the Peruginesque fresco now rightly given to 
Pintoricchio. That angel who so strenuously stops the 
great prophet, those two women who are so intent on the 
circumcision of Glershom, might well be the work of 
Perugino, who would not be unlikely to help his pupil in 
a task so important as work in this chapel, among so 
many illustrious painters, must have been. And indeed in 
Pintoricchio's other fresco, the Baptism of Christ, the 
hand of Perugino would seem to be even more visible. 
More conservative than the Journey of Moses, we find here 
the mandorla of cherubim, the isolated groups, each with 
its own dramatic interest, that were just then being dis- 
carded by the Renaissance. And was it from Fiorenzo that 
Pintoricchio learned to paint so many portraits in his 
pictures, or did Fiorenzo learn it from him 1 The figure of 



PINTORICCHIO 221 

Christ, so reverent, so humble, the profound quietness of 
the figure of the Baptist, are perhaps the finest achievement 
in figure-painting that Pintoricchio ever reached. But it 
is rather in the exquisite landscape, and in those flying 
angels who lean towards the Eternal, that we see the 
influence of Perugino most surely. And yet as a piece of 
space-composition how far short of Perugino's work in this 
chapel, the Delivery of the Keys to St. Peter, are these two 
frescoes ! It is, as I think, very obviously not the master 
but the follower, the imitator, that we find in these paintings, 
which are full of Perugino's desire for space and light and 
yet so crowded. It is true that we have in Pintoricchio 
a master of space-composition ; but how much less spiritual, 
how much less religious is its efi'ect on us in his pictures 
than in those of Perugino and Raphael ! And yet in spite 
of any fault that we may, perhaps a little inconsequently, 
find in work so sincere, so eager for a certain sort of success, 
as the work of a youth of twenty-eight years of age it 
must surely have dazzled the painters of that day. For 
even beside the work of Botticelli it is by no means con- 
temptible, promising as it does quite another sort of success — 
a success which, as it seems to me, never came to Pintoricchio, 
who concerned himself rather with certain trivialities than 
with the enthusiastic and passionate art that was just then 
dawning in the world. The whole of the rest of his life 
would seem to have been a kind of enlargement and multi- 
plication of the more charming successes of these early 
works. He paints a whole city of pretty women, whose 
dresses fall in those unforgettable folds, as though he had 
lingered with delight on the thought of the gracious attitude 
of some woman he had loved. Again and again you find 
his fields bright with spring flowers, his valleys white with 
daisies or starred with campanulas. In his skies you will 
find so many little birds, that you will be sure he must have 



222 THE CITIES OF UMBRIA 

loved them, and everywhere he lingers fondly over the 
innocent, trusting life of animals : dogs which look up at 
his figures so intelligently, gentle deer, and a snowy brood 
of rabbits. And at last in the Borgia apartments you come 
upon a whole delightful country, a kind of Garden of Eden, 
where the animals are friends with man — man and woman 
being always so dainty, so charming there; so that they 
play among the tall flowers unafraid, and the birds sing 
under the soft sky, or build in the strange, fantastic 
trees. 

It might seem that here at last was an Umbrian painter, 
from Perugia, too, who was not in captivity to religion ; who 
had, as it were, thought of the world, of beauty, as of 
more value, or at least more valuable, to Art than Faith. 
But it is no such attitude of mind, I think, that we find in 
Pintoricchio's work, but rather a certain faculty for narrative, 
a delight in the story that a picture unfolds with so many 
accessories, pretty aids to the decoration of a tale, which 
for us at least have their value, not aesthetic, perhaps, but 
historical. - To him as to Perugino the scene is of importance, 
is full of an incisive and delicate reality, but it awakes in 
him no spiritual exaltation ; space is to him a kind of 
dimension with which his master has taught him to conjure, 
it is never fulfilled with that light and air and largeness in 
which Perugino so often painted some scene poor enough 
in itself. Some poetical or religious sense— something, I 
know not what, is wanting. As you wander through the 
Libreria at Siena, how poor seems the fulfilment of the 
promise in the Sistine Chapel. ' Almost perfect as archi- 
tectonic decoration,' Mr. Berenson has said of these careless 
works. It is hardly possible perhaps to express better their 
one virtue. He could compose with space well enough to 
deceive us as to the badness of his work as a figure- 
painter. 



PINTORICCHIO 223 

It was in 1501 that Pintoricchio went to Spello, where a 
bishop of the house of Baglioni had determined to decorate 
his cathedral. Ruined as they are to-day, these frescoes 
possess a charm that in spite of every fault is delightful. 
AVhat a pretty world this painter has created ! How much 
more charming than Italy is, or stony Palestine, or any 
country that ever was in the real world ! It is his curse 
this obsession by a continual desire for prettiness, and yet 
it is so sincere withal, so evidently well meant, that it is 
difficult to be angry. Besides, his life was none too happy. 
Yasari, always a little contemptuous of those who were born 
neither in Florence nor in Arezzo, or who had not won the 
applause of the Florentine masters as Perugino had done, 
suggests that his death came almost through a contemptible 
piece of avarice. A certain Sigismondo Tizio, however, a 
writer of his own day, and an historian of Siena, tells another 
and a sadder story. As he lay sick it seems, his wife, who 
never loved him, locked him into his room, and passed the time 
until his death with one she found more to her mind. His 
cries appear to have attracted the notice of certain neigh- 
bours, who afterwards told Tizio the story he relates. And 
it seems that owing to the neglect of his wife, whom Tizio 
accuses of making a deliberate attempt to starve her husband, 
Pintoricchio died in 1513. 'The little painter,' with, it 
would seem, so many physical disadvantages, had yet managed 
to gather sufficient glory to keep his mxcmory green. Indeed, 
'he is the first ornamental painter of Italy. To write of 
him as a ' decorative ' artist is to give the reader a false 
impression. He is by no means a great decorative artist. 
Not decoration but ornament — sumptuous, gay, and always 
charming ornament — was his aim. -The Borgia apartments, 
the Libreria at Siena, are not monuments of decorative art, 
but are possibly the most sumptuously ornamented rooms 
in Italy. To speak of him as in the first rank, as it seems 



224 THE CITIES OF UMBRIA 

certain writers of our time have done, or as a great ' master 
of decoration,' seems to me impossible. He is, as Dr. Ricci 
has so well said, 'wholly destitute of passion,' and to think 
of him as anything but a minor painter with those words 
after his name should be for ever impossible. 



UMBRIA MYSTIGA 



XXI 
JOACHIM DI FLORE 

IN the eleventh and twelfth centuries when the romantic 
spirit, the spirit of chivalry, was everywhere, certain 
Italian poets began to imitate the songs of the troubadours. 
It was a moment of crisis in the history of Europe ; Italy 
was awakening from her long sleep that had been so full of 
terrible dreams, and with the fall of the Hohenstaufen we 
find a real and living poetry, wholly national, beginning to 
supersede the imitative sense of those obscure poets who 
found their inspiration in the Proven9al songs. 

An age of frightful, unforgettable disaster was just passing 
away. Beginning with the decay of the Eoman Empire and 
the coming of the Barbarians, it was in the first place the age 
of the spread of Christianity, that Oriental religion which, 
in the midst of every sort of political catastrophe, it was 
necessary for Europe to assimilate. Out of the chaos of 
those terrible years, blazing with every sort of sensuality 
and cruelty, one beautiful and splendid figure had arisen, 
the forlorn hope of the world — the Catholic Church. And 
indeed, though for no other cause yet for this, is she Holy 
and Divine, that through all those centuries of misery and 
barbarism, in spite of the brutal lust and cruelty of the 
North, the suicidal madness of the "Latin world, the devasta- 
tion within, the devilish wars without, she kept safe for us 
Humanism and Law, controlling the new Faith in its excesses, 
calm and composed amid all the destruction and madness, 

227 



228 THE CITIES OF UMBRIA 

gradually building up stone by stone, fortress by fortress, 
tower by tower, pinnacle by pinnacle, that invincible and 
everlasting city of light that has survived every attack, 
every disaster, every passion of humanity ; that has educated 
the world, preserved its treasures of learning, held in 
reverence the old great masters, recreated Art and protected 
Humanism, in the early days as in the Renaissance, from 
the barbarism of the Reformation as from the vulgarity and 
vandalism of to-day. 

In the decaying Roman Empire misery had been common 
enough, but the coming of the barbarian peoples, Goths and 
Germans, without laws or morals, overwhelmed Italy under 
an army of devils. Physical torture, everlasting devastation 
and war, were their delight and their daily life. Under that 
wave all culture was lost, civilisation ceased to exist, and 
Rome, the capital of the world, that in the time of Trajan 
had possessed a population of nearly two millions, was in 
546, when Totila, King of the Goths, had done with her, 
during the space of forty days utterly devastated, without a 
single inhabitant. Nor was this her last trouble ; for three 
hundred years later the Mohammedans sacked Rome and 
plundered the treasuries of St. Peter and St. Paul, leaving 
their indelible mark on Italy in many a castle and watch- 
tower by the sea. She who was eventually to rise again 
and master the world, as of old, by the power of her intelli- 
gence and her art, the indestructible genius of the Latin 
race, the virtue and authority of her civilisation, was a 
ruin. 

Nor was the intellectual life of the Middle Age less terrible 
than the physical. Rome it seems had not yet had time to 
civilise Christianity. Every sort of brutality was practised 
in that name. Antiquity with its tolerance and its beauty 
was swept from men's minds, and instead ignorance reigned, 
with fear and credulity, a mighty trinity, damning indis- 



JOACHIM DI FLORE 229 

criminately all the poets and philosophers, with the 
exception it may be of Virgil — that divine poet whom the 
Barbarians were unable to understand, since they regarded 
him not as a poet but as a kind of magician not unfriendly 
to their frightful religion, of which of course he knew 
nothing. 

In the year 529, St. Benedict, the first great educator of 
the modern world, destroyed on Monte Cassino the last 
Temple of Apollo; and those doctrines of lore and 
equality that might seem to have been lost sight of by the 
barbarian zealots of the new religion gradually came to be 
preached throughout Europe. *My Order/ he said, 'is a 
school where men learn to serve God.' It was that and 
much more. It was for some hundreds of years the only 
school in Europe that touched the mass of the people. 
Where the Benedictines brought the Cross, there also they 
took the plough, and so gradually brought Europe under 
cultivation; reclaimed the swamps and marshes, drained 
the wet lands, and dammed the springs for the use of them- 
selves and the people. Founded on Silence and Obedience, 
his Eule was naturally rather the means of doing work 
than of suppressing heresy or producing the arguments of 
the schoolmen. It was, too, the friend of the Arts, almost 
their foster-mother. The work of the Order was, however, 
necessarily gradual, and for more than five hundred years 
the most terrible ignorance and brutality continued to 
torture humanity. Terrified by its sins, driven mad by 
the fear of Hell, a kind of gloom fell upon the world. 
Men, caring nothing for any human aiffection or relationship, 
flogged themselves to death in the mountains. I do not 
suggest that all the world took part in such excesses, but 
that all men saw in this madness, this self-torture, a kind of 
ideal. All Europe appears to have been in a state of 
melancholia. Suddenly, with a kind of immense relief, she 



230 THE CITIES OF UMBKIA 

thinks to purge herself of all her sins at the very tomb of 
Christ ; and so, one after another during two centuries, the 
Crusades devastate Europe ; wave after wave of fanatic 
heroism, army after army, are dashed in pieces against that 
stone which Joseph placed before the tomb of Jesus. 

Meanwhile that Church which had crowned Charlemagne 
as Emperor was indefatigably building her Empire in the 
hearts of men. And in thinking of those terrible years it is 
as the Saviour of the world she appears to us, calm and 
inscrutable upon her everlasting hills. For hundreds of 
years the Emperors strove to snatch her power from her; 
many armies were hurled against her in vain ;. indestructible 
and victorious, she was busy creating the modern world, 
restoring to us Humanism and Art and Beauty, angry if 
some eager mind threatened to attain her end before she 
was ready to advance, for the whole world was as it were 
in her keeping; loving best that profound and reverent 
intelligence which alone was capable of understanding her, 
since she demanded from her soldiers a duty of reverence, 
of fidelity toward the old as toward the new ; to the past as 
to the present ; assured in her heart of her victory, since 
she would save the world not by revolution but by develop- 
ment and remembrance. 

And it is really into that world, as it were, of the twelfth 
and thirteenth centuries that we come when, passing through 
Arezzo, we approach Cortona, where Brother Elias lies buried. 
By the time that Joachim di Flore announced to the world 
the advent of the kingdom of the Spirit, the coming of 
St. Francis, Rome was mistress of the soul of man. That 
spirit which had so hardly conquered the world, and brought 
a kind of order out of all the chaos of the Middle Age, was 
about to renew itself — not without a certain fear and pain. 
And so it was not altogether without protest that Joachim 
and the Franciscans restored something of the spirit of 



JOACHIM DI FLORE 231 

Jesus of Nazareth to a world that by its own extravagance 
and brutality had rendered the letter so necessary and 
so tyrannical. 



The immense unrest of the twelfth century, its desire for 
expression, its profound dissatisfaction with its own achieve- 
ment, may be found in the life of one of the most mysterious 
personalities of that age of mysticism. Joachim di Flore 
was a dreamer, a revolutionary thinker, rather than a man 
of action. He seems to have foreseen the achievement of 
St. Francis, the immense power of poverty over the hearts 
of men, though himself incapable of any such victory of 
Love. We discern in him a kind of poet who was in 
sympathy rather with mysticism than with government; 
and, unimportant though his Order of Flore proved to be, 
he at least attained to a certain authority in that religious 
dream which was about to become aware of itself ; so that 
we find his influence still living many jT-ears later, partly in 
his prophecies, those strange, enigmatical sayings so likely 
to achieve a kind of fulfilment ; partly in the passionate 
vitality, that was rebellion almost, against fate, as it were, 
in so great a man as John of Parma, and that remnant of 
the Franciscan Order which remained loyal to the ideal 
of St. Francis. That after Joachim's death a certain doubt 
of his orthodoxy appeared, is really an acknowledgment of 
his importance in the history of mystical Italy, where he 
lives as a kind of anarchist, anxious, above all, about the 
freedom of the spirit of man ; so that at one time the Greek 
and Latin Churches seem to him just Sodom and Gomorrah, 
while at another he professes his faith in humanity. And 
so to us as to Dante he appears as a prophet brooding over 
the immense and shapeless future of the world, of humanity, 
of the soul of man. 



232 THE CITIES OF UMBRIA 

Born at Colico near Cosenza about the year 1130, he be- 
came a monk of the Cistercian Order, and towards the end of 
that century we find him an abbot of a monastery of that 
Order in Calabria. Something mysterious, inexplicable, 
seems to have surrounded him from his birth, so that his 
ancient biographers tell us that there was nothing more 
wonderful and strange in the birth of St. John Baptist than 
in that of Joachim ; and, indeed, it is as a kind of St. John, 
a forerunner of St. Francis who is so like to Christ, that we 
think of him now, as his followers seem to have done. Before 
he was seven years old he had lost his mother, and, as was 
not uncommon in that age, in spite of the stories of his 
youthful piety, he was not baptized until his eleventh year. 
A kind of beauty expressed very delightfully in the stories 
concerning him seems always to surround him, as when we 
find him praying on a great rock in the midst of the woods 
near his father's house. Some curious influence which those 
near him always felt in his presence, in a kind of allegory, as 
it were, softened the hardness of the rock, perhaps, as indeed 
the legend suggests, by reason of the daily contact of that 
body 'very pure and chaste,' so that a wonderful flower 
with healing in its petals grew there, nor was this wonder 
long hid from the people round about. At last a woman 
who had often watched him praying plucked the flower to 
cure some beasts that were sick, and it might seem to be 
characteristic of that time, differing as it does so profoundly 
from our own age, that we read that the people were discon- 
solate at the loss of this flower, and went to the young 
Joachim in tears and besought him to pray yet once again in 
that place ; and not without a certain shame he agreed, and 
suddenly there was seen not the same flower but a spring, 
which could not be stolen away, and which 'ceased not to 
flow till his death.' That story in its simplicity might stand 
for an allegory of his life. He seems to have touched life so 



JOACHIM DI FLORE 233 

rarely as almost to have left it unregarded. So when he 
became page to Eoger ii., Duke of Calabria, it is really only 
a moment before he is disgusted with court life and on his 
way with a certain Andrea to Palestine, and having passed 
through many adventures, in which he is marvellously saved 
from drowning, from robbers, and from the plague, he returns 
to Italy to his father, from whom at last he wins permission 
to embrace the monastic life, retiring very gladly to the 
Abbey of Sambucin of the Cistercian Order. And was it as 
a kind of explanation of his indifference to life, his pre- 
occupation with the Scriptures, or as a vision that he had 
really encountered of what his life m.ust be, that he has told 
us of the youth of exquisite beauty who came to him one day 
of sunshine saying, 'Joachim, drink this, for it is divine.' 
And when he had drunk so much as he thought he had need 
of he gave back the cup, but the youth refused it with in- 
dignation, saying, 'If you had drunk it all, there is not a 
science in the world in which you would not have been 
perfectly instructed, but now you will only have knowledge 
of the Scriptures.' A little later we find him taking the life 
vows and entering the Abbey of Curace, where he became 
first prior and then abbot. And it was during his life 
at Curace that he became famous as a preacher and a 
prophet, foretelling, as is said, the sufferings of Pope 
Lucius III. ; seeing on the walls of St. Mark's, during a 
journey to Venice in 1185, the images of St. Francis and 
St. Dominic in the habits of their Orders ; assuring those who 
heard of this vision that these were two prophets whom God 
would send to the help of His Church. It was, it would 
seem, almost like a second Jonah that he came to the city by 
the sea, preaching repentance, that strange sad cry that has 
echoed out of the wilderness deafening the world. In the 
midst of his encounters with the world he retired from 
Curace, going to Casemar, after a meeting with Frederic 



234 THE CITIES OF UMBKIA 

Barbarossa, whose ideas and government pleased him as little 
as those of the churches he had perhaps a little hastily con- 
demned. It was during his retirement at Casemar that he 
composed one of the few authentic works we possess from his 
hand, the Psalterium decern chordarum. It seems that on 
the Day of Pentecost he was before the altar intending to 
recite certain Psalms in honour of the Holy Ghost, when 
suddenly he began to doubt the Mystery of the Holy Trinity. 
Throwing himself to the ground, he invoked the Holy Spirit 
to dissipate his doubts, at the same time reciting those 
Psalms he had proposed to himself, and in a moment the 
figure of the Psaltery with its ten strings came to him as in 
a vision, and in some subtle way he thought that he had 
found in that instrument of music an emblem as it were of 
the Holy Trinity. In his wonderful mind, so sensitive 
always to sensuous impressions of beauty or fitness, all his 
doubts are dissipated ; nor could he forbear from crying out, 
' It is Thou, Lord, who doest all wonders ; is there a God com- 
parable to Thee ? ' It was thus that he composed the work, 
dividing it into three books which correspond to the Three 
Persons of the Holy Trinity. In the first he treats of the body 
of the instrument itself, which is the source of all the melody it 
produces, and this is the Person of the Father, from whom all 
things proceed. In the second he speaks of the number of 
the Psalms which are sung upon the instrument, and these 
under the name of Wisdom represent Him, per quern omnia 
facta sunt. In the third he explains the method of Psalmody, 
which by reason of its sweetness and melody represents the 
unction of the Holy Spirit, that Lord and giver of life, in 
whom are all things hid. 

It is perhaps in this book that we find the first suggestion 
of that famous saying ascribed to him through many 
centuries, though but doubtfully his own : ' The kingdom of 
the Father is passed, the kingdom of the Son is passing, the 



JOACHIM DI FLORE 235 

kingdom of the Spirit is to be.' And it is indeed chiefly as 
the prophet of this kingdom of the Spirit in all its freedom 
and perfection that Joachim di Flore' is of importance to us. 
Whether or no he was the author of the 'Eternal Gospel,' he 
was at least the forerunner of a new age, which used his ideas 
and expressed his thoughts in action. It is, as he himself 
says, the ' etiquette of a doctrine ' that he gave to the world. 
And he is capable of a vision of history so serene that he can 
say, ' The Hoty Spirit saved the Greeks, the Son works the 
salvation of the Latins, the Eternal Father watches over the 
Jews, and shall save them from the hatred of men without 
its being necessary for them to forsake Judaism.' And as 
though in an ecstasy of optimism very rare in that age, he 
says, 'The Old Testament, the work when the Father 
governed, may be compared to the ancient or original sky, 
to the light of the stars. The New Testament, the work of 
the time when the Son reigned, to the second sky, to the 
light of the moon. The Eternal Gospel, the work of the 
time which shall be governed by the Holy Spirit, to the light 
of the sun. The first was a starry night, the second was the 
dawn, the third shall be the broad day. The first bore 
nettles, the second roses, the third shall bear lilies. The 
first is represented by Septuagesima, the second by Lent, the 
third by the joy of Easter.' 

For him even Christ and his disciples came short of per- 
fection in the contemplative life. For it is there, in all the 
quietness of thought, that he foresees the future of humanity. 
And so when certain miracles ascribed to him, perhaps a 
little hastily, for he himself never claims them, bring great 
crowds to his monastery, he retires to Flore and establishes 
there the first monastery of his reformed Order. In com- 
parison with this new Order, says his old biographer, the 
Cistercians appeared 'comme un Ordre relache qui avait 
deja besoin de reforme.' Yet he foresees the persecution. 



236 THE CITIES OF UMBEIA 

the misunderstanding, and destruction to which his ideas 
will be subject, rejoicing for the most part only in those 
strange visions of St. Francis which come to him from time 
to time, and which it might seem impossible to explain. 
Nor is he, in spite of his severity towards himself, without 
a certain Epicureanism, for we read of the magnificent 
gardens that surrounded his abbey, and of his delight in 
beautiful churches. And he is friends with kings ; foretelling, 
as it is said, to Eichard Coeur de Lion of England his mis- 
fortunes and his death, and chiding Frederic Barbarossa for 
a certain indifference towards spiritual things, not neces- 
sarily religious, which he discerned in him. 

For himself he will not claim any gift of prophecy, finding 
in himself rather a kind of intelligence, a little rare and 
subtle, which enables him to understand mysteries in the 
Scriptures hidden from the vulgar, and even from those who 
appear so learned. He died on Passion Sunday, March 30th, 
1202, aged seventy -two years. And in his Will we find the 
reason, perhaps, of the defeat of his Order3 of his ideas, and 
of his own personality in conflict, more or less open, with 
the Catholic Church. 'I have achieved,' he says there, 'as 
far as I have been able, and as it has pleased God to inspire 
me, the work on the Two Testaments in five books; an 
Exposition of the Apocalypse in eight parts ; the Psaltery 
with Ten Strings in three volumes, and some smaller works 
against the Jews or the enemies of the Catholic Faith. I 
reject all that the Holy Catholic Church rejects. I accept 
all that she accepts, believing firmly that the gates of Hell 
cannot prevail against her.' 

Hardly a Christian at all in middle life, looking for a new 
Order, a revelation less limited, a freedom of spirit beyond 
anything to be found even in the early Church, he submits 
himself at last to the only power capable of defeating him — 
the Catholic Church. He died a Christian, but his ideas 



JOACHIM DI FLORE 237 

could not die. His dreams had so stirred the hearts of 
men in that strange and beautiful country of Central Italy, 
that when St. Francis began to preach in 1209 many of those 
who heard him understood him. For St. Francis was the 
true son of Joachim, though it is possible he was unconscious 
of his parentage. He too failed as did Joachim, and yet at 
one time it seemed possible the world might become Fran- 
ciscan rather than Christian, so powerful was that idea of 
freedom which these dreamers offered to men. All, or almost 
all, which they dreamed and desired has been achieved for 
us by means how different, by intelligences how prosaic, in 
comparison with these poets of the twelfth and thirteenth 
centuries. 

It was a divine madness that they wished to thrust upon 
the world — a dream of reaching some ill-defined goal, which 
they only knew in a vision, by some short cut or byway. 
And for this cause the Roman Church crushed them ; because 
in her keeping lay ail the work of the old great masters, the 
precise and necessary order of the world along whose inde- 
structible highways she was determined to march. Ever of 
the centre, holding as strictly to the temperate judgment, 
the hardly achieved civilisation and art of the world, as to 
the dreams of Jesus of Nazareth, she was at once the heir 
of Roman Law, of Roman Religion, of Roman Art, of all that 
so great civilisation, and of the new religion of Love which 
had come into the world so late. Already she had seen the 
enthusiasm of the ignorant peoples sweep away a very 
precious civilisation; in her heart for centuries she had 
kept safe for us all that they had sought utterly to destroy, 
and now that she was mistress of our world, responsible for 
everything that lifted man a little above the beasts with 
whom he still shares the world, she found it necessary to 
crush all those who, as it were, hampered her in her untiring 
march towards a goal that only she had really seen. So she 



238 THE CITIES OF UMBRIA 

destroyed Joachim and St. Francis, both of whom she under- 
stood and loved. The victory of either meant not only her 
own destruction but the loss of order, of certain success, in 
a kind of enthusiasm, an excitement that was dangerous, 
seeing that it v/as founded neither on the intellect nor on 
faith, but on a certain imaginative faculty so capable of 
seeing visions and of dreaming dreams, so liable to change, 
as to be almost at one with it ; so poetical, not always in the 
best sense, as to be led away by beauty or tears ; so terrible 
as to acquiesce in its own annihilation. 

It was perhaps a new religion that Joachim and his 
followers, John of Parma and Gerard, tried to found; a 
religion having much in common with the later Lutheran 
movement in its most engaging form, in that the appeal was 
ever to the individual conscience, to the spirit rather than to 
the letter, to the personality rather than to society. The 
Eternal Gospel which influenced certain minds in the 
thirteenth and fourteenth centuries so strongly, if it ever 
had any real existence as a book, seems to have been a kind 
of harmony or collection of thoughts, perhaps, from the 
works of Joachim. ' Spiritual men,' he says, * are not 
obliged to obey the Roman Church, nor to acquiesce in its 
judgments in matters pertaining to God ' ; nor does he appear 
to see in his enthusiasm for liberty the impossibility of 
dividing the spiritual, who need not obey or acquiesce, from 
the worldly, who must do so. 

In a world that has forgotten Joachim for many a dreamer 
less bold, for many a personality less lovely, his ideas are by 
no means dead. A kind of anarchy in spiritual things has 
for centuries been the normal condition of Northern Europe 
and America. And there we may see that the soul which 
insists upon meeting God as it were haphazard, without 
introduction, and in no immemorial way, has not attained to 
greater freedom than the Catholic who seems to be so fettered. 



JOACHIM DI FLORE 239 

Bound by its indifference, or lonely in the immense solitude 
of love, if it seeks for God it knows not where to find Him ; 
and if it seek Him not, to whom else S'hould it go 1 At least 
in that beautiful and ancient way in which, seeking Him, we 
may ever find Him in the Mass ; Himself the reason for, the 
beginning and the consummation of that ancient and beauti- 
ful service which, like some divine hostel, gives us the Bread 
of Life just for love. And if one may find Him there whose 
service is perfect freedom, where else can there be liberty 
that we should seek it out, or why come to Him through 
distracting byways, or do anything but hasten towards Him 
along the great highway as our fathers have told us 1 

And again, in thinking of St. Francis of Assisi, it is 
necessary for us to keep Joachim di Flore in continual 
remembrance. For though St. Francis was perhaps uncon- 
scious of the humanist who divined the modern world in the 
midst of mystical Italy, at the last his most loyal followers 
were captured by a philosophy at once so revolutionary and so 
divine.. The Eternal Gospel consumed the simple divinity 
of him who went barefoot and shared his life with the birds 
and the sun, to whom man was merely the best-beloved of 
the thoughts of God. Coming to us then with the most 
perfect simplicity, with an appeal scarcely less certain than 
Jesus Himself, St. Francis in his claim to be a son of God 
only repeats the divine message of Christ. Like a child he 
sees God and understands the secret of His love. His 
achievement was neither consciously revolutionary, nor in any 
sense hostile to the Catholic Church, for he himself was ever 
her most loyal son ; and yet in the perfection of his simplicity, 
in the clearness and sensitiveness of his conscience, in his 
immense love for the whole world, he accused her of a kind 
of compromise, not with evil, perhaps, but with indifference. 
It seems to have been with a sort of surprise that the 
Church saw him take Christ at His word. That mediocrity 



240 THE CITIES OF UMBEIA 

which is the almost certain fate of governments and societies 
was impossible for him, he was never in danger from it. 
He is the Jesus of the Middle Age ; neither does he hesitate 
to sweep away the intervening centuries and to take Christ 
by the hand. He alone of all men dared to understand Him. 
It has been said of him that he is himself one of the most 
powerful reasons for believing Jesus to have been divine. 
For in the love of everything that surrounded him, which 
claimed the birds as his sisters, and would have rescued even 
the worms from the indifference of man, which overcame the 
most brutal natures and made them burn with love, which 
saw everywhere beauty and intention, and accepted the 
flowers as not the least of God's gifts, we find the true 
achievement for once of the teaching of Christ — that perfect 
love which was to overcome all things and to be a divine 
wisdom. And it is just here that St. Francis himself, if ever, 
touches Joachim di Flore. For Joachim the Spirit was of 
more importance than anything beside ; it was the third 
kingdom, a kind of Paradise that was to be built in the 
hearts of men freed from the immense superstitions of the 
intellect. - Well, St. Francis in a moment, has attained to 
this state and has conformed his life to it. And he has 
achieved this victory not by means of knowledge, as Joachim 
seems to suggest, but by means of love — a love that is free 
from the possession of anything whatever. For him and his 
brothers it is a sin to possess anything, not merely because 
Christ said it was better to be poor than to be rich, but 
chiefly because those who think they possess things are really 
always possessed by them. He divines a life fuller and more 
enjoyable in this perfect liberty; those things which are 
worth having being not only indivisible but impossible of 
appropriation. And so by his love, by his acquiescence in 
the mere rules of the Church, by his humility and simplicity, 
he achieves all that Joachim had dreamed, in a way how 



JOACHIM Dl FLOEE 24i 

much more lovely. Art, which is the child of Poverty, 
began to flower on his tomb. And it is almost to that 
sacred place, as holy for the Humanist as for the Religious, 
that we may trace all that is really worth having in the ages 
which have followed his death. Pietro Cavallini and his 
school, Giotto and his pupils, recreated Italian Art in his 
honour and because of him. Dante was his son. AVhat is 
there to be said in religion that he has not understood and 
expressed in his life ? 

And to-day in England, for instance, how absurd would his 
life appear to us ! Indifferent alike to the kingdom of the 
Spirit that captured the imagination of Joachim, and to 
Poverty whom St. Francis married, we, immersed in business, 
not for its own sake but for the sake of gain, in order that 
we may accumulate trifles ; our material needs increasing 
every moment, our spiritual sensitiveness decreasing ever 
faster and faster as we gain riches; in that little yellow 
desert of gold which we have created as our indestructible 
prison, look on St. Francis as a kind of lunatic. But the 
beauty which surrounds him always, the art which sprang 
from his tomb, we shall never possess. Bankrupt in spirit, 
without art, without a peasantry, without an aristocracy, 
but with an ever-increasing multitude happy in their 
mediocrity, as we walk over our hills black with smoke, while 
still Umbria is golden in the sun, or down the streets of 
our trumpery and hideous cities, it is not love but hate that 
possesses our souls. Kings and princes, poets and monks, 
republics and peasants, having in the past created our v>^orld, 
built up our civilisation, given us our art and our historj^, it 
might seem that we, grubbing for gold, lying and cheating, 
and immersed in business, may destroy it utterly in our con- 
tempt of anything that is not mediocre, or to be bought with 
money. This is an age of business men, an age of grocers 
and clerks, and I have yet to learn that such have given us 

Q 



242 THE CITIES OF UMBRIA 

anything worth having. As we walk over the Umbrian 
hills in a country still blessedly poor, among a people still 
noble, that has not forgotten how to fight, or to suffer, or to 
pray, it is strange to think how natural St. Francis would 
seem even to-day in Assisi, how impossible in London or 
New York, contented in the desperate mediocrity with that 
part of life which, since they never see the sun, is scarcely 
worth having at all. 



XXII 
ST. FRANCIS OF ASSISI 

IN M. Sabatier's life of St. Francis of Assisi there is much 
which only an exquisite and loving care, a patient and 
profound scholarship, could have divined, as it were, in the 
lovely but fragmentary legend of his life. During many 
years devoted to the study of the life of the little poor 
man of Assisi, M. Sabatier has gradually made clear for us 
those things which were hidden and obscure, thro^ving a new 
light on that life of peculiar perfection, so that he seems to 
suggest that under all the beauty and sweetness that have led 
men to think of St. Francis as an imitation of Christ there 
lies the revolutionary, the progressive reformer, intent on his 
own freedom of spirit and the liberty of the hearts of men. 
And whatever we may think of so new a reading of the 
parable of St. Francis's life, we are from the first surprised to 
find one whom we had always considered as the most humble 
of saints suddenly converted into a kind of divine schismatic, 
an amiable Martin Luther at least in his intention, accusing 
Xhe Church, rather by his conduct, it would seem, than by his 
teaching, of the betrayal of mankind into a kind of slavery 
from which he, the little poor man, would set it free. Words 
of his trenchant enough to justify this impression are not 
recorded, and would have been out of keeping with a genius 
of which one characteristic is its supreme obedience. It 
would seem that he never exercised his own judgment with- 
out a certain hesitation, or if he did, how many times he 

243 



244 THE CITIES OF UMBRIA 

has reproached himself ! And, indeed, if we are to accept 
M. Sabatier's view of this saint of an alien religion, we 
must ever after think of St. Francis as really a failure, seeing 
that he was able neither. to overthrow the authority of the 
Church which established his Order, nor to take a single 
step without her approbation. But, to an eye less keen, a 
criticism less revolutionary, St. Francis might seem to be 
the last man to create schism. Out of his austerity and 
strength came sweetness, not destruction ; not denial, but 
the lovely affirmation of the promises of Christ. He was 
not concerned with the tremendous politics of the Catholic 
Church, but in the dust and dirt he found the lilies of her 
love. For the real revolution, for which St. Francis worked, 
was a resurrection of love among men. He, too, with St. John, 
seems ever to repeat, 'Little children, love one another.' If 
this ancient and orthodox teaching may confound the Church, 
then, indeed, St. Francis was her enemy ; but he who loved 
even the poorest and the most wretched would have been the 
last to embrace that Mother who had taught him all he knew, 
and introduced him, as it were, to Him who was ever his 
pattern, in any hasty or ridiculous anathema. 

The Middle Age, that poetic period — poetic as we see it, 
perhaps, a little ideally — really comes to an end, is, as it 
w^ere, summed up, in St. Francis. It was an age of great 
passions, of the most splendid enthusiasm, profoundly humor- 
ous and merry, too, in a way that the Reformation and 
Renaissance, in the North at any rate, have for ever made 
impossible. And even as Raphael seems to sum up, and b}' 
a certain divinity in his nature to save the age of the Renais- 
sance from itself almost, so St. Francis is, as it were, the 
saviour of those dreamy years that went before him ; in him 
they seem to find their true interpreter; by him they are saved 
from a charge of brutality that without his life it might not 
be easy to deny. So we seem ever to find him passing up and 



ST. FRANCIS OF ASSISI 245 

down those Umbrian roads, in the vineyards, or in the olive 
gardens, or upon the mountains, singing his French songs 
by the way, laughing and weeping ar little in the sunshine, 
at one with Nature and with God ; since in every flower of 
the field there was some divinity, in every delicate, serene 
day a suggestion of His perfection, while the crested larks 
ceaselessly praised Him, and the cool beauty of the night 
was, as it were, only a fragment of that silence which 
surrounds Him always. 

Born in 1182, the son of wealthy parents, St. Francis was 
named Giovanni at the font of S. Rufino, the Cathedral 
Church of Assisi, while his father was aw^ay on a journey, 
possibly to Lyons, to sell cloth or silk ; it was only on his 
return that he was renamed by him ' II Francesco,' the little 
Frenchman. Educated by his father, not only as became 
a merchant, but to some extent as became a fine gentleman 
of the day, Francis appears first to have turned his thoughts 
towards Heaven from a world that he ever found gay, after 
a long illness. It was from this time that we find him with 
' no relish but for solitude and prayer.' A sudden dislike of 
all that rather brutal life which had so fascinated him — the 
encounters in the streets, the vanishing loves of the twilight, 
itself not less swift in its passing than those facile affections, 
the brightness of war, the long days full of just amusement 
— seems to have come to him in his convalescence, so that 
those first days in which he was free from physical suffering 
were a kind of purification, or new birth. The past seems 
to have fallen away from him, to have receded into a dim 
perspective, and in his first encounter with Nature, with 
the woods and the fields, after so helpless a time in the dark, 
he was cleansed, returning to the simplest things, as indeed 
one is so ready to do in those mystical days of recovery from 
sickness, when the heart opens so frankly to the sunlight and 
all the delicate things of spring, the rain and the flowers. 



246 THE CITIES OF UMBRIA 

But it would appear that with perfect health something of 
the old desire for life, for what he understood life to be, 
returned to him, and it is as on the eve of departure for 
some entrancing adventure that we see him suddenly stopped 
by a vision, as it is said, so that he had only gone as far as 
Spoleto when he determined to return, making his way back 
to Assisi to the surprise of every one. It is as though he has 
suddenly heard a voice calling him, calling him, so that after 
many hours of seclusion he is observed by his friends to be 
pale, and attentive, as it were, to some invisible friend or 
companion, and ever after he is strange to them. In their 
happy, inconsequent, thoughtless lives, it is only love, they 
think, some fantastic passion less fleeting than usual, that 
can have absorbed him so from the life about which he used 
to be so eager. 

'Thou art in love,' they tell him. 'Go to, Francesco is 
about to take a wife.' But it was a wife more mysterious 
and lovely by far than any they had dreamed of for him 
that he is about to wed. ' Yes, I shall take a wife,' he says, 
'more beautiful and more pure than you can imagine.' But 
he spoke of Lady Poverty. And, indeed, in those silent 
fields about Assisi, littered with flowers and musical with 
many waters, a mind less mystical than St.. Francis's might 
well have been charmed with the thought of a wandering 
life, the freedom of just that ; that not here but in heaven 
have we any place of abiding, any real treasure worth having ; 
it is there, perhaps, that we come upon the true impulse of 
his life, as it was certainly the one revolutionary idea in his 
simple rule. And we find this joy in a life of wandering, 
the delights of the road, the surprise always to be found in 
that sort of life in the word 'to-morrow,' the love of strange 
sights and men, manifest in him in a pilgrimage he appears to 
have made about this time to Rome. He went, or at least 
returned, as a simple pilgrim begging his way, and in this 



ST. FRANCIS OF ASSISI 247 

real encounter with poverty, an intercourse voluntary and 
made for love with those who depend for very life on the 
' charity or caprice ' of the passer-by, he seems at last to have 
found a real happiness, so that the gloom which had over- 
shadowed him ever since his illness is finally dispersed, and 
ever after we think of him as possessed of a great cheerful- 
ness, which later did so much to transform Christian asceti- 
cism, giving it something of his own, something perhaps that 
it really lacked until his day, and has lost since. 

It was one day in St. Damian's Church without the walls 
of Assisi, that, kneeling before a Crucifix, he heard again a 
voice — that voice which creeps into the lives of all the saints 
as that mighty river winds through the valleys of Umbria — 
saying thrice over : ' Francis, go and repair my house which 
thou seest falling'; for even in those days the church was 
very old and frail, haunted by innumerable unavailing prayers 
and unworthy petitions. And coming home he, without 
thought of evil, overwhelmed by that implacable voice, ' took 
a horse-load of cloth out of his father's warehouse, and sold 
it together with the horse ' at Foligno, a town some twelve 
miles from Assisi. So he came back to St. Damian's Church 
with the money, which he offered to the priest, who, however, 
refused it, laying it on the window-sill ; but the priest, though 
old and poor, seems to have seen something divine in the 
young man after all, for he permitted him to stay with him 
and loved him. But Peter Bernardone, the father of Francis, 
came to St. Damian's Church angry because of the loss of 
his cloth and of his horse, but finding the money laid on the 
window-sill he grew calmer, though he did not forbear to 
denounce his son as a madman, in which the townspeople 
seem to have agreed with him. And later Bernardone, 
attracted by the noise of the children pursuing a beggar 
through the streets with cries of 'Pazzo, Pazzo,' discovers 
his son in that wretched one whom they persecute. So he 



248 THE CITIES OF UMBRIA 

compelled him to come home, and having bound him, he 
locked him into a closet, but his mother set him free when 
his father was gone. Thus the story of St. Francis begins 
with an unusual touch of everyday humour, none the less 
charming on that account, since the saints as a rule early put 
humour away from them with life. 

And St. Francis, freed by the love of his mother, returned 
to St. Damian's straight, where after a time his father found 
him; and when he had found him he demanded that he 
should return home, or forgo his inheritance. For a moment 
that patience which so rarely deserted him seems to have 
been insufficient for him, for he replied that he was no longer 
under the government of his father. M. Sabatier seems to 
suggest that he may at this time have already received minor 
Orders, but he has no evidence to support his view; and, 
indeed, it might seem that St. Francis meant that he was 
already in the service of God, and must be about his Father's 
business. However this may be, we find him appealing to 
the ecclesiastical power. Before the bishop, who, as well 
may be, was astonished no less at the severity of the father 
than at the eagerness of the son for poverty, and appears 
therefore to have hesitated, St. Francis, impatient of delay, 
' stripped himself of his clothes and gave them to his father, 
saying cheerfully and meekly, " Hitherto I have called you 
father on earth, but now I say with more confidence Pater 
noster qui es in ccelis, in whom I place all my hope and 
treasure."' The good bishop, somewhat overcome by the 
remarkable action and fervour of the youth, and for the sake 
of Lady Modesty, gave Francis his cloak for the moment, 
and later procured that of his servant for him, which Francis 
signed in chalk with the Holy Cross and cheerfully accepted 
as his first alms. Thus St. Francis renounced the world and 
set out for heaven, being about twenty-five years old. 

And it was now in the wonderful spring, which is so loth 



ST. FEANCIS OF ASSIST 249 

to go in Umbria, that he took to the hills singing on his 
way. In the sunshine of that silent world what dreams, 
poetical and mysteriously sweet, camfe to him we may not 
know. Only that they were of a certain strange beauty 
is most sure ; for while in the mountains, he fell among 
thieves, who demanded of him who he was; and he made 
answer, 'I am the herald of the Great King, but what is 
that to theeV And, having stripped him, they cast him 
into a ditch, saying, ' There is thy place, poor herald of God.' 
And when he had come to himself he went on his way, all 
naked as he was, singing through the forest till he came to 
a monastery, where he was permitted to serve in the kitchen ; 
but they gave him nothing, so that he left them, and having 
a friend in Gubbio across the mountains, he journeyed so 
far, and received some clothes and at once set out for 
St. Damian's. 

St. Francis now began to beg money to repair St. Damian's ; 
and having collected a little, he with his own hands helped to 
carry the stones, and so repaired the church. It was about 
this time that he began to visit the lepers, whom even as a 
youth he had so pitied. And it was at this time also that he 
went to La Porziuncula, a little chapel nearly two miles from 
Assisi, belonging to the Benedictines of Subiaco. When St. 
Francis came there on that morning in 1207 he found it in an 
utterly ruinous condition, almost unfit either for service or 
dwelling. He immediately set himself to repair it, which he 
jiid before the year was out. And it happened that as he 
knelt one morning in that little chapel while a monk from 
Subasio said Mass, the words of the Gospel were those with 
which Christ sent forth His disciples ; and for the second 
time he heard that voice, loving and mysterious, with so 
great a sweetness and yet not without a certain severity : 
'Take nothing for your journey, neither staves nor scrip, 
neither bread, neither money ; neither have two coats apiece.' 



250 THE CITIES OF UMBEIA 

And it was this one coat, girt with a rough cord, that in the 
next year, 1208, he gave to his disciples as their habit, when 
first Bernard, a rich man of Assisi, and then Peter, and then 
Giles, 'a person of great simplicity and virtue,' joined him as 
his brethren in his cell at Porziuncola. Nor was it in any 
melancholy spirit that these simple persons came together 
and separated themselves from the world and its possessions, 
but rather with a great cheerfulness. They went singing 
through the fields, so that they came to be known as 
Joculatores Domini — God's joyful ones, or jesters — as they 
laboured with the peasants in the fields or praised God at 
evensong. He who thus with so much joy had penetrated 
into the most secret places of the hearts of men preferred 
always happiness to unhappiness, the simple delight in the 
beauty of the world to the mysterious dislike of earthly 
things, since heaven was so much the more splendid, which 
overtook so many of the Saints. Well, it is not perhaps a 
mark of anything but Catholicism, that 'making a fool of 
oneself for God,' which is not infrequent in St. Francis's life. 
In the service of the world his sons despised what they served, 
and yet loved it too because they served it. " Nor in spite of 
their antics had they anything in common with Puritanism, 
that most hateful of all heresies ; for the sign and mark of true 
vocation was a certain joie de vivre, not without its tragic 
moments, which we so often find in the lives of his followers. 
It was in 1209 that St. Francis set out for Eome, and 
obtained there a verbal approbation of his Order from 
Innocent ill. This great Pope had at that time already sat 
for twelve years upon the throne of St. Peter. A man of 
immense authority, he had brought low the King of England 
not less easily than he had humbled King Pedro of Aragon, 
who had laid his very crown upon the tomb of the Apostle 
in token of his submission. The first Latin perhaps of the 
modern world to raise the cry ' Italia ! Italia ! ' he was not 



ST. FEANCIS OF ASSISI 251 

less great as a reformer of the Church than as a statesman ; 
for even as he made the Papacy a great political power, ' in 
some sort the suzerain of the Emperor,' so by 'his indomit- 
able firmness in defending morality and law ' he was able to 
gain a certain moral strength which was both useful as a 
weapon of political warfare and lovely for its own sake. A 
great Pope of a great ambition, certainly the greatest states- 
man in Europe in his day, he was by no means the mere 
politician certain Protestant historians of the life of St. 
Francis have tried to prove him. That he did not immedi- 
ately approve of the somewhat vague Eule which St. Francis 
submitted to him, consisting as it did of certain texts from 
the Gospel, is not surprising. For many years he had been 
busy suppressing ecclesiastical disorders, and when suddenly 
asked to approve of a new congregation which must, so far 
as he could see, subsist by mendicancy — as indeed it came to 
do, since it had no possessions of any sort, desired none, and 
forbade the possession of any property whatsoever, either by 
the congregation itself or by any individual member of it — 
Innocent III. may well be excused for a certain hesitation. 

It may be well here to traverse certain statements made 
by M. Sabatier in his Vie de S. Frangois d 'Assise. While 
protesting my admiration at the devotion and scholarship 
that divined the existence of a legend of St. Francis earlier 
than any we possessed, and acknowledging the debt every 
student of the life of St. Francis must owe to him for his 
.monumental work, ^ Spemliim Ferfedionis, seu S. Francisci 
Assisienis Legenda Antiquissima^' audwe Fratre Leone, it is yet 
with a certain hesitation one accepts his conclusions, seeing 
that he so evidently fails to understand Mysticism and the 
Catholic religion. St. Francis, for- him, is a kind of rebel 
against authority, a kind of heretic whom the Catholic 
Church thought best to conciliate and aftervv'-ards to destroy. 
Words of his, strong enough to warrant this conclusion, 



252 THE CITIES OF UMBEIA 

may be found in his book, Vie de S. Francois. It is there he 
says that it would have needed very little for the Franciscans 
to meet the same fate at the hands of Innocent ill. as the 
Waldenses had from Lucius iii. But we find that from the 
first moment in which St. Francis was introduced into the 
Pope's presence by Cardinal Giovanni di S. Paolo, he met with 
nothing but sympathy from Innocent. ' My dear children,' 
the Pope said, ' your life appears to me to be too severe ; 
I see, indeed, that your fervour is too great for any doubt of 
you to be possible, but I ought to consider those who shall 
come after you, lest your mode of life should be beyond your 
strength.' It was in these words, surely not without a 
certain fatherly kindness, that the Pope suspended judgment. 
Nor is it surprising that no definite decision was come to at 
once. In every question of importance, Eome, realising her 
immense responsibility, has refused to decide on the instant ; 
it was the same with the Dominican Order, with the Society of 
Jesus, and with the Franciscans, and although M. Sabatier can 
see little but defiance in the beautiful parable of the woman 
who was very poor but beautiful and the great king, to a 
mind less prejudiced against the Catholic Church there might 
seem to be less defiance than humility. Nor does the account 
we have of St. Francis, prostrate at the Pope's feet, ' promis- 
ing the most perfect obedience with all his heart,' seem con- 
sistent with any attitude of defiance that the enemies of the 
Church Catholic as of him have sought, as we may think in 
vain, to find in his heart. And we find the Pope, who was so 
powerful and strong a shepherd of the Church, blessing him, 
saying : ' Go, my brethren, and may God be with you. Preach 
penitence to every one according as the Lord may deign to 
inspire you. Then when the All-powerful shall have made 
you multiply and go forward you will refer to Us ; We will 
concede what you ask, and We may then with greater 
security accord to you even more than you ask.' 



ST. FRANCIS OF ASSIST 253 

Nor was it in any spirit of hostility to the Priesthood that 
St. Francis conceived his mission to the world. That he 
himself never became a priest argues his humility rather 
than his contempt or hatred of those who alone could 
administer the Sacraments, things of very little account to 
Protestant or Agnostic to-daj^, but of an immense importance 
to all Christians in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. 
Francis claimed no freedom for himself or his companions 
from the duty of confession, as Molinos, the unhappy Spaniard, 
did later. He himself, like S. Teresa, must ever have been 
under the direction of a confessor ; and, indeed, the respect 
due to the clergy was the subject of his frequent counsels to 
his disciples, so that we find him telling them that a priest 
should not be met except they kiss his hands. And so it is a 
little confusing to find a scholar like M. Sabatier, to whom we 
owe so much, suggesting that the religion of St. Francis was, 
as it were, quite independent of the priest ; summing up his 
argument in an unhappy and confused comparison, a little 
rhetorical, of Christ who first ordered that high dignity, that 
so chargeable ofhce, to the little Saint of Assisi ; finding the 
likeness of Him Avho was the Son of God to him who was so 
perfect an imitation of Him in the strangely sentimental 
heresy that Christ * came to preach a worship in spirit and in 
truth, without priest or temple, or rather that every fireside 
shall be a temple and every believer a priest.' 

Nor is it only in an attitude of mind a little unsym- 
pathetic towards government and authoritj^, those splendid 
and classical virtues of the Roman Church, that we seem 
to find M. Sabatier at fault. His apprehension of Mysticism 
is imperfect, for we find him making a statement so 
extraordinary as the following must of necessity appear 
to any student of the lives of the Saints. 'Francis,' he 
says, 'is of the race of mystics, for no intermediary comes 
between God and his soul.' It would be sufficient to examine 



254 THE CITIES OF UMBRIA 

very briefly the experience of so mystical a soul as St. Teresa 
to expose the superficial reasoning, the profound fallacy of 
such a statement. It might seem that since all action is the 
result of ideas, whether consciously apprehended or not, it is 
necessary if we would understand the lives of the Saints to 
make sure of what their ideas were, of what they believed. 
And since, indeed, I find no phenomena in any other company 
of those who call themselves Christians comparable for a 
moment to the lives of the Saints, it might seem that some 
idea peculiar to the Catholic Church informed their minds — 
an idea strange and lovely and altogether different from 
those which have led in the end to any other form of action, 
religion, science, or philosophy. And I find this idea so full 
of vitality, from which beauty so naturally ensued, to have 
been the claim of the Catholic Church to be in possession of 
a supernatural religion. To her, absolute truth is revealed ; 
nor is she, since she remembers the promises of Christ, 
amazed at the miracle. To believe, is for her and for her 
children an act of submission to authority, while to any 
other Christian is it not a kind of conscious choice, among 
many astonishing possibilities, necessarily subject to all the 
ailments of the reason to which in the end man becomes the 
slave, howsoever imperfect it may be 1 And so at last we 
understand that while the Catholic is content with the 
authority of the Church, believing indeed that it is sufficient 
for all occasions since Christ has promised He shall not fail 
her, the Protestant or the Agnostic is dependent either on 
the indestructibility of a book that is already falling to 
pieces, or on his reason warped by its own inherent def ormitj- 
after centuries of struggle and prejudice, by innumerable 
circumstances that have enslaved it, by to-day's delight or 
to-morrow's sickness ; and at last when he is conscious of the 
merely brutal and destructive capabilities of this imperfect 
instrument, he is compelled to take refuge in a kind of 



ST. FRANCIS OF ASSIST 255 

spiritual nihilisnij eager to deny that he knows anything but 
that he must die, that he apprehends anything save that 
tedious journey from the brute, which'he is even now in the 
midst of, travelling as he is from no whither that he may 
know, nor even yet in any place of abiding, since even now 
he is stepping forward to some goal, to some resting-place, of 
whose satisfaction he is not sure ; inexplic9.ble alike to him- 
self and to his fellows, finding in that brutal confusion a kind 
of delightful mystery, an irresponsibility, which seems to 
place him a little further from the final achievement of the 
simplicity of all those things that yet await the hand of the 
creator, a little nearer to that brute creation with whom he 
shares the world. 

And indeed, since such an one is not sure of God Himself, 
how is it possible that he should apprehend even for a 
moment that 'annihilation in God,' which is the informing 
desire of all the Mystics 1 It is just there that M. Sabatier, 
who for the most part has shown us so exquisitely St. 
Francis as he lived, fails us. His own reason is his enemy, 
so infirm that it is incapable even of apprehending anything 
contrary to experience; he is unable to concede the inter- 
vention of God, Whom he prefers to call the ' first cause,' in 
any particular case at all. It is not surprising that he 
falters over the story of the Stigmata; indeed, it is only 
surprising that he should have attempted to deal at all with 
a life so full of that 'intervention of God' as the life of 
St. Francis. And so when we find St. Francis glorified as a 
kind of rebel, a little scornful of the clergy, anxious to 
approach God in any way rather than by means of the 
Church, or eager to withstand a Pope so strong and excellent 
as Innocent ill., we shall understand that so beautiful was 
his life, so full of humanism and love, so altogether lovely, 
that the officers of every rebel sect or schism in Christendom , 
are anxious to claim him from the Church which signed him 



256 THE CITIES OF UMBRIA 

with the Cross at the font, gave him his first prayers, fed 
him with the Bread of Life, taught him all he knew, aided 
him in his work, comforted him in his sorrow, upheld him at 
the last, and buried him with tears when he died, setting 
him among her Saints ; and to-day as for hundreds of years 
she invokes his prayers, while his sons are her sons, his 
daughters her daughters, his God her God, now as then, nor 
shall the avarice of a thousand starving heresies ever deprive 
her of him or him of her. 

For indeed to understand the spirit of this man — so like 
to Christ as to have seemed to be almost a reincarnation of 
Him, so that the legend tells us that he was born in a stable 
as was our Lord, and other things too they had in common — 
is to possess oneself of one of the most beautiful things in the 
world. His body we are told he called Brother Ass, because 
it must bear great burdens and be beaten, and rest but of 
necessity. Everything and every sort of animal in the world 
were to him brethren or sisters. Thus the sun, the moon, 
and the stars, the fishes, the birds, and the flowers, are as it 
were only perhaps more attentive members than ourselves of 
the family of God. A profound humanist in the best sense of 
the word, he in that rough and rude age had in more than one 
way, as it were, anticipated the Renaissance. ' Know, dear 
brother,' he says to his companion, ' that courtesy is one of the 
qualities of God Himself, Who of His courtesj^ giveth His 
sun and His rain to the just and the unjust ; and courtesy is 
the sister of charit}^, the which quencheth hate and keepeth 
love alive.' 

It was in March 1212 that St. Francis met Clare, the 
daughter of Favorino Sciffi, a knight of noble family, she 
having run from home to Porziuncula, where St. Francis 
dwelt with his companions. Before the high altar St. 
Francis gave her the penitential habit, and there being as 
yet no Franciscan convent, he sent her to the Benedictine 



ST. FEANCIS OF ASSISI 257 

nunnery of St. Paul. Thus was founded the congregation of 
Poor Clares so famous throughout the world. 

It was about this time too that St. Francis set out 
for Palestine, thinking that the Gospel had but to be 
'announced' to the Saracens who held the Holy City and 
they would be converted. But this strange mission was to 
come to nothing, St, Francis being wrecked on the coast of 
Slavonia; and having come to shore he returned to Italy, 
landing it would seem at Ancona, where he began to preach 
on his way back to Assisi. And coming to the lake of 
Perugia, called Trasimeno, he passed Lent there on an island 
alone. The author of the Fioretti tells the tale very simply 
and beautifully. 

' It befell on a time,' he says, ' that St. Francis, on the day 
of carnival, being hard by the lake of Perugia in the house of 
one of his devoted followers, with the which he had lodged 
the night, was inspired of God that he should go and 
keep that Lent on an island in the lake ; w^herefore St. 
Francis besought this devoted follower that, for the love of 
Christ, he would carry him across in his little boat to an 
island on the lake, wherein no man dwelt, and that so he 
would do upon the night of Ash Wednesday, so that none 
might be ware of it ; so he for love of the great devotion 
that he had unto St. Francis, with diligence fulfilled his 
request and carried him across to the island aforesaid, and 
St. Francis took with him naught save two small loaves. 
And being come unto the island, and his friend parting 
himself to go back home, St. Francis besought him tenderly 
that to no man would he reveal in what guise he. there abode, 
and that save upon Holy Thursday he would not come to 
him ; and so he ran away. And St. Francis remained alone : 
and sith there was no dwelling-place whereunto he might 
betake him, he entered into a close thicket which many a 
thorny bush and shrub had fashioned like a cave or little hut : 
R 



258 THE CITIES OF UMBRIA 

and in this place he gave himself up to prayer and con- 
templation of the things of heaven. And there he abode all 
the Lent, nor eating nor drinking aught save half of one of 
those small loaves, even as was found by his devoted follower 
on Holy Thursday what time that he came back to him ; 
who found of the two loaves one still entire, but of the other, 
half. So men believe that St. Francis took no food from 
reverence for the fast of Christ, the blessed one, who fasted 
forty days and forty nights without partaking of any earthly 
food ; but in this manner with that half a loaf chased far the 
venom of vain glory from him, and after the pattern of 
Christ kept fast for forty days and forty nights ; and there- 
after in that place where St. Francis had wrought such 
wondrous abstinence, through his merits did God work many 
miracles ; for the which cause did men begin to build houses 
there and dwell therein ; and in brief space uprose a hamlet 
fair and great, and therewithal a house for the brothers, the 
which is named the House of the Island ; and even to this 
day the men and women of that hamlet have great reverence 
and devotion for the place where St. Francis kept the 
aforesaid Lent.' ^ 

During that same year, 1213,^ he appears to have been in 
Romagna, where he met a certain Conte Orlando dei Cattani, 
who being moved as much, it might seem, by the personality 
of St. Francis as by the words that he spoke, gave him a 
certain mountain, 'especially favourable to contemplation,' 
called La Verna, in Tuscany. It may be that St. Francis 
was not able to visit this lonely and beautiful place till 1224, 
as the author of Fim^etti gives us that date, though he states 
that it was in that year too that Conte Orlando gave La 
Verna to St. Francis. 

^ The Little Flowers of St. Francis, newly translated out of the 
Italian by T. W. Arnold, London, 1900, pp. 23-25. 
2 Sabatier, op. cit., p. 400. 



ST. FRANCIS OF ASSISI 259 

However that may be, this period of his life is confessedly ob- 
scure. A certain pessimism and despair seems to have obscured 
his vision of life for a time, for we read of him as doubting 
what he ought to do ; whether to give himself wholly 
unto prayer, or whether, at least in part, to devote himself to 
preaching. A certain desire for the contemplative life, as he 
found it among the Benedictines, seems to have possessed 
him, and it was only at the earnest entreaty of St. Clare and 
Father Silvestro that he continued his work of preaching and 
evangelisation. For it is God's will, they tell him, that he 
shall go throughout the whole world to preach, 'since He 
hath chosen thee not for thyself alone, but also for the salva- 
tion of others.' So he seems to have set out in no little 
haste, and coming to Bevagna, preached to the birds, as may 
be seen in many a pleasant fresco up and down Italy. A 
profound pantheism and love for all God's creatures, in whom 
since He created them the seeing eye may discern something 
of the Creator, is one of the chief characteristics of St. Francis. 
Nor was his love for these creatures of God confined to those 
among them whom we in our dull vulgarity alone think of 
as living. He had a great love for fire. ' Brother Fire, noble 
and useful among all the creatures,' as he says when, being 
nearly blind, the physician is about to burn his eyes, *be 
gentle to me in this hour, for I have always held thee in love, 
and shall ever do so for love of Him who created thee.' And 
his praise of the sun is surely one of the immortal verses in the 
,great poetry of the world. ' Praised be thou. Lord, for all 
thy creatures,' he says, 'and especially for my Brother the 
Sun which gives us the day, and by him thou showest thy 
light. He is beautiful, shining with great splendour ; and 
of thee, Most High, he is the symbol.' 

His life was a great romance, full of a profound Humanism, 
that he had attained not by means of the intellect, but by 
Love. He is a triumphant vindication of the truth of 



260 THE CITIES OF UMBRIA 

Christian ethics. Hardly able to read, unlearned in any way, 
ignorant alike of music and of painting, he is yet a complete 
Humanist— wise enough, temperate enough, to own at last 
that it may well be he has been less than fair to his Brother 
the Body. * He had ever a tender pity for all gentle crea- 
tures,' one of his old biographers tells us. It is the burden of 
his whole life ; so that he speaks of the birds as his sisters, and 
of the wolf as his brother. Nor was he without an under- 
standing of Nature in her less kindly moods, for he feels 
the terror lurking in a great forest, the fear of loneliness 
among the shadows of the great musical trees, or upon the 
mountains, and is only really happy among the byways, 
where he goes singing his French songs fulfilled with joy in 
the sunshine and in the rain. 

It may well be that St. Francis met St. Dominic in Rome 
in 1215. They can have had but little in common. For St. 
Dominic the earth has already ceased to exist ; he finds there 
no beauty at all, only a kind of prison from which the soul 
is ever striving to be free — that soul for which in the end he 
will sacrifice everything, in whose service he will torture the 
body, or burn the very world, that it may attain a kind of 
cold perfection under authority. It is rather a new system 
of education that he introduces into the world than a new 
idea, a reconciliation of all that old Asiatic asceticism with 
learning, so that in the end the soul may have, as it were, 
even more to renounce. And poet though he is, it is of Heaven 
and the Blessed Virgin he sings rather than of the sun 
or the birds, or the happiness of life. He is a true Spaniard. 
Those arid and tawny deserts, perhaps the most terrible and 
ardent country of the world, have robbed him of everything 
but a great desire for slavery ; and so when he meets St. 
Francis, it is as one who has already submitted to authority 
with a kind of voluptuous joy. And while we may regard St. 
Francis as a Humanist, as a joyous knight in the service 



ST. FEANCIS OF ASSISI 261 

of humanity, simple and unconscious of anything but love, 
we find St. Dominic, already a little dazed with visions, 
a little mad with the sensuality of words, looking on man- 
kind as a herd of desperate souls who must be enslaved by 
the promises of Christ, by the immense future of the Church. 
And yet they had thus much in common, that they were both 
dreamers — the one absorbed in the future of Christianity, the 
other in the future of man; and it is told how that as they 
were about to part from one another in Rome, St. Dominic, 
anxious it might seem for one more submission, begged St. 
Francis that he would give him the cord wherewith he was 
girded, the which he ever after wore under his habit. ' At 
length the one did place his hands between the hands of the 
other, and each did most sweetly commend him to each in 
mutual farewell greeting. And St. Dominic said unto St. 
Francis : " Brother Francis, I would that thy Religion and mine 
should be made one, and that we should live in the Church 
under equal conditions.'" No answer is recorded by the 
author of the Speculum Perfedionis to this strange request. 
St. Francis perhaps understood the insatiable ambition of 
St. Dominic, an ambition that was by no means personal or 
unworthy, for conquest. Profoundly as the Dominicans 
transformed the Franciscan Order after the death of St. 
Francis, in his lifetime they were powerless to influence it. 
Had St. Francis agreed to that strange request how much 
poorer the world would have been, how much less various 
,the centuries ! 

In 1219 was held at La Porziuncula the great Chapter 
called ' of Matts,' because, being very numerous, it was im- 
possible to find a building in which it might assemble, so 
tents and booths were set up in the fields. So great had 
the Order grown that it is said more than five thousand 
friars came to this general Chapter. It would appear that 
it was about this time that certain disorders and modifica- 



262 THE CITIES OF UMBEIA 

tions of the Eule began to show themselves. St. Francis 
who was in the East is reported dead, a messenger is sent 
to him imploring his return. He appears to have arrived 
at Venice, July 1220.^ Something of these disorders may 
be found in the Speculum Perfedionis, and M. Sabatier gives us 
a letter, found in Cap. 6 of the Rule of the Damianites, in 
which St. Francis again asserts his purpose. 

' I, little Brother Francis, desire to follow the life and the 
poverty of Jesus Christ, our most high Lord, and of His 
most holy Mother, persevering therein until the end ; and 
I beg you all and exhort you to persevere always in this 
most holy life and poverty, and take good care never to 
depart from it upon the advice or teachings of any one 
whomsoever.' 

And at last his life of action is over ; ever after he is 
compelled to be just a kind of peacemaker among his own 
children. It was such a crisis as the Pope had foreseen, 
perhaps, when St. Francis first asked him for an approbation 
of his Rule. How is it possible, many had begun to ask, 
to live without possessions 1 The freedom which St. Francis 
had understood was only attainable through poverty, that 
immense influence in the hearts of men, to be acquired by 
possessing nothing, was really gone for ever. The next 
few years are devoted to an attempt to fix his idea upon 
his Order. We see him in many an exquisite moment 
with St. Clare, with the mysterious and beautiful ' Brother 
Jacoba,' that sorrowful Roman lady who loved him, with 
Brother Leo and the rest, always a little overcome by the 
passionate strength of that which he had created. In 
those years he becomes almost a contemplative, condemned 
by his own thoughts, dreaming of the Passion of Jesus 
Christ, the divine figure that had inspired and sustained 
his whole life. 

^ Sabatier, op. cii., p. 229. 



ST. FRANCIS OF ASSISI 263 

It was about the time of the Feast of the Exaltation of 
the Holy Cross in September 1224, that St. Francis made 
his retreat on Monte La Verna, and there received the 
Stigmata from our Lord Jesus Christ. Conte Orlando 
had given that mountain to him as early as 1215, and so 
it was that St. Francis came to make his retreat there in 
the sorrowful years of his life, before the Feast of the 
Exaltation of the Cross. 

He being alone was wont to say Matins with Brother 
Leo, who, in order to see whether or no St. Francis wished 
his company in prayer, used to cry out, Domine, labia mea 
ajperies — ' Lord, open thou my lips ' — when he drew near 
that place where St. Francis was. But on this morning 
St. Francis made him no answer, and contrary to St. 
Francis's desire, but with the very best of intentions, dear 
little brother Leo crossed the bridge over the chasm which 
you may see to this day, and entered into St. Francis's cell. 
There he found Francis in ecstasy, saying, ' Who art thou, 
most sweet my God 1 What am I, most vile worm and 
thine unprofitable servant 1 ' Again and again Brother 
Leo heard him repeat these words. And wondering thereat, 
he lifted his eyes to the sky, and saw there among the stars, 
for it was dark, a torch of flame very beautiful and bright, 
which, coming down from the sky, rested on St. Francis's 
head. So thinking himself unworthy to behold so sweet 
a vision, ' he softly turned away for to go to his cell again. 
And as he was going softly, deeming himself unseen, St. 
Francis was aware of him by the rustling of the leaves 
under his feet.' Surely even to the most doubtful, that 
sound of the rustling leaves must bring conviction *? And 
St. Francis explains to Brother Leo all that this might 
mean. 

' . . . And as he thus continued a long time in prayer, he 
came to know that God would hear him, and that so far as was 



264 THE CITIES OF UMBEIA 

possible for the mere creature, so far would it be granted him 
to feel the things aforesaid. . . . And as he was thus set on fire 
in his contemplation on that same morn, he saw descend from 
heaven a Seraph with six wings resplendent and aflame, 
and as with swift flight " the Seraph drew nigh unto St. 
Francis so that he could discern him, he clearly saw that he 
bore in him the image of a man crucified : and his wings 
were in such guise displayed, that two wings were spread 
above his head, and two were spread out to fly, and other 
two covered all his body. Seeing this, St. Francis was sore 
adread, and was filled at once with joy and grief and marvel. 
He felt glad at the gracious look of Christ, who appeared to 
him so lovingly, and gazed on him so graciously ; but on 
the other hand, seeing him crucified upon the Cross, he felt 
immeasurable grief for pity's sake. . . . Then the whole 
Mount of Alvernia appeared as though it burned with bright 
shining flames, that lit up all the mountains and valleys 
round as though it had been the sun upon the earth ; 
whereby the shepherds that were keeping watch in those 
parts, seeing the mountain of flame and so great a light 
around, had . exceeding great fear, according as they after- 
wards told unto the brothers, declaring that this flame 
rested upon the Mount of Alvernia for the space of an hour 
and more. In like manner at the bright shining of this 
light, which through the windows lit up the hostels of the 
country round, certain muleteers that were going into 
Eomagna arose, believing that the day had dawned, and 
saddled and laded their beasts : and going on their way, 
they saw the said light die out and the material sun arise. 
In the seraphic vision, Christ, the which appeared to him, 
spake to St. Francis certain high and secret things, the 
which St. Francis in his lifetime desired not to reveal 
to any man ; but after his life was done, he did reveal 
them as is set forth below ; and the words were these : 



ST. FEANCIS OF ASSIST 265 

"Knowest thou," said Christ, "what it is that I have done 
unto thee 1 I have given thee the Stigmata that are the 
signs of my Passion, to the end that' thou mayest be my 
standard-bearer. And even as on the day of my death I 
descended into hell and brought out thence all souls that 
I found there by reason of these, my Stigmata, even so 
do I grant to thee that every year on the day of thy death 
thou shalt go to Purgatory, and in virtue of thy Stigmata 
shalt bring out thence all the souls of thy three Orders, to 
wit, Minors, Sisters, Continents, and likewise others that 
shall have had a great devotion for thee, and shalt lead 
them unto the glory of Paradise, to the end that thou 
mayest be conformed to me in death as thou art in life." 
Then this marvellous image vanished away, and left in the 
heart of St. Francis a burning ardour and flame of love 
divine ; and in his flesh a marvellous image and copy of the 
Passion of Christ. For straightway in the hands and feet 
of St. Francis began to appear the marks of the nails in 
such wise as he had seen them in the body of Jesus Christ 
the Crucified, the which had shown Himself to him in the 
likeness of a seraph : and then his hands and feet appeared 
to be pierced through the middle with nails, and the heads 
of them were in the palms of his hands and the soles of his 
feet outside the flesh, and their points came out on the back 
of his hands and of his feet, so that they seemed bent back 
and rivetted in such a fashion that under the bend and 
rivetting, which all stood out above the flesh, might easily 
be put a finger of the hand as a ring : and the heads of the 
nails were round and black. Likewise in the right side 
appeared the image of a wound made by a lance, unhealed 
and red and bleeding, the which afterwards oftentimes 
dropped blood from the sacred breast of St. Francis, and 
stained with blood his tunic and his hose.' 

It was thus that St. Francis received the Stigmata. Nor 



266 THE CITIES OF UMBRIA 

is there any reason to doubt the writer of the Fioretti. That 
St. Francis actually received the Stigmata is as certain as 
any other fact of history, and far better attested than most. 
* Ces paroles,' says M. Saba tier in defending the authenticity 
of Fra Masseo's letter, in which are found these words of 
St. Francis : * Farewell, thou mountain of God, thou holy 
mount, — Mons coagulatus, Mons pinguis, Mons in quo 
beneplacitum est Deo habitare,' — 'Ces paroles ont dii verita- 
blement etre prononcees par lui.' 

No long time after St. Francis came to die — lame from the 
sacred wounds, and ill and weary at last. No longer as in 
his youth could he sing those French songs in the byways 
and olive-gardens around Assisi. We catch a glimpse of 
him in the convent garden of St. Clare, under the shade of 
the olive-trees in a summer of drought ; and again carried 
in a litter by his companions on the way from Assisi to 
S. Maria degli Angeli, he bids them halt that he may bless 
the city before he dies. It is ever thus I seem to see him, 
broken and feeble and yet beautiful withal, turning to bless 
the city that had laughed at him so long ago. 

Was it at evening or in the dawn that he saw the little 
city at the foot of the beautiful mountain for the last time ? 
And indeed the words in which he blessed her are not the 
least lovely of his life : ' Blessed be thou of God, holy city, 
seeing that through thee shall many souls be saved, and in 
thee shall dwell many servants of the Lord ; and out of thee 
shall many be chosen for the kingdom of eternal life.' And 
they carried him to St. Mary of the Angels. 

Of the three women who loved him. Pica his mother, 
Clare Sciffi the nun, and the Lady Jacoba, but one was with 
him when he died — the Lady Jacoba. That she loved him, 
who will doubt ? Have we not all loved him in our fashion ? 
Is he not dearer to us than any other hero of romance 1 And 
it is, as I think, while she held his hands, having kissed him 



ST. FEANCIS OF ASSIST 267 

many times, that he was content to let his spirit go free, 
while those crested larks he had so loved sang him up to 
heaven and praised him to the angels. ' Lady Jacoba di 
Sentensoli of Eome, who was the greatest lady of her time 
in Rome, and had a great devotion unto St. Francis, both 
before he died and after his death, both saw and kissed these 
wounds many times with much reverence, because by divine 
revelation she came from Rome to Assisi for to be present at 
the death of St. Francis, the which befell in this wise. . . . 
For St. Francis called unto him one of his companions and 
said unto him: "Brother, most dear, God hath revealed to 
me that from this sickness on such a day I shall pass away 
from this life ; now thou wottest that the beloved Lady 
Jacoba di Sentensoli, who is so devoted to our Order, would 
be sore grieving if she heard of my death and had not herself 
been present : whereby send her word that if she would see 
me alive again, let her come here straightway." Replied the 
brother : " Father, thou hast well said ; for of very sooth for 
the great devotion that she bears thee, it would not at all be 
fitting that she should be absent at thy death." "Go then," 
quoth St. Francis, "and bring me inkhornand paper and pen, 
and write as I shall tell thee." And when that he had brought 
them St. Francis dictated the letter after this manner : "To 
the Lady Jacoba, the servant of God, Brother Francis the 
poor little one of Christ, greeting and the fellowship of the 
Holy Spirit in our Lord Jesus Christ. Know, dear lady, that 
Christ the Blessed One hath of His grace revealed to me 
that the end of my life is shortly at hand. Wherefore if 
thou desire to see me still alive, when thou hast seen this 
letter, do thou arise and come unto Saint Mary of the 
Angels, for if thou art not come by such a day thou wilt not 
find me still alive : and bring with thee a shroud of hair- 
cloth to wrap my body in, and the wax that is needed for 
the burial. I pray thee likewise that thou bring me some 



268 THE CITIES OF UMBRIA 

of the food that thou wast wont to give me when I lay sick 
in Rome." And while this letter was writing, it was of 
Grod revealed unto Saint Francis that the Lady Jacoba was 
coming unto him and v/as even then come nigh the House, 
and was bringing with her all the things he was asking for 
by letter. Therefore, having this revelation, Saint Francis 
said unto the brother that was writing the letter, that he 
should write no more, seeing that there was no need, but 
should lay the letter aside : at the which thing the brothers 
marvelled much, in that he finished not the letter and 
desired that it should not be sent. And after a little space 
there was a loud knocking at the door of .the House, and 
Saint Francis sent the porter to open it. And the door 
being opened, behold ! there was the Lady Jacoba, the most 
noble lady in all Rome, with her two sons that were senators 
of Rome, and a great company of horsemen, and they 
entered in ; and the Lady Jacoba went straight to the 
infirmary and came unto Saint Francis. And of her coming 
Saint Francis had exceeding great joy and comfort, and she 
likewise, beholding him still alive and having speech of him. 
Then she told him how God had revealed unto her in Rome 
as she was at prayer the near end of his life, and how he 
would send for her and ask for these things, all of which she 
said she had brought with her ; and she let bring them to 
Saint Francis and gave him to eat. And when he had eaten 
and was much comforted, the Lady Jacoba kneeled down at 
the feet of Saint Francis and took those most holy feet, 
marked and adorned with the wounds of Christ, and kissed 
them and bathed them with her tears in such a rapture of 
devotion, that to the brothers that stood around it seemed 
they saw the very Magdalene herself at the feet of Jesus 
Christ, and by no means could they draw her away. And 
at length after a long space they lifted her up thence and 
drew her aside ; and they asked her how she had come at a 




pulpit: lower church, s. Francesco, assisi 



ST. FRANCIS OF ASSISI 269 

time so fitting and so well provided with all things that were 
needed for the sustenance and for the burial of Saint Francis. 
Eeplied the Lady Jacoba, that as she Was praying in Rome 
one night, she heard a voice from heaven saying : " If thou 
desire to see Saint Francis still alive delay not to go unto 
Assisi, and take with thee the things thou wast wont to give 
him when he was sick, and the things that will be needed for 
his burial " ; and (quoth she) " even so have I done." So the 
said Lady Jacoba abode there until such time as Saint Francis 
passed away from this life and was buried ; and she paid 
great honours unto his burying, she and all her company, 
and she bore the charges of whatsoever was needed. Then 
returning to Rome, after a short time this gentle ladj^ died a 
holj'' death ; and of her devotion to Saint Francis she decided 
and desired to be carried to Saint Mary of the Angels and 
be buried there, and so it was done.' ^ 

St. Francis died one day of October 1226, and it was 
Saturday. In St. Mary of the Angels, the Lady Jacoba 
Aveeping beside him as Sasseta has told us, he lay listening 
to the song of the birds he loved best, when Christ caught 
him away from our earth, which has ever been the poorer 
since we spared him. 

It is said of him that Death, which is to all men so 
terrible and hateful, he praised, calling her by name : ' Death, 
my sister, welcome be thou ' ; and that one of those best-loved 
brothers saw his soul in the manner of a star, ' like to the 
]?ioon in quantity and to the sun in clearness.' And however 
we may think of him, whether he is to us one of the most 
precious saints in all that splendid calendar, or whether he 
is merely a delightful figure a little ailing, a little mad from 
the Middle Age, he went honourably upon the stones, like 
Him who was called Stone, as de Voragine reminds us. ' He 
gadryd the wormes out of the wayes, by cause they should 
^ She lies under the pulpit in the Lower Church at Assisi. 



270 THE CITIES OF UMBRIA 

not be troden with the feete of them that passyd by.' He 
called the beasts his brethren ; and in all that age of passion 
and war, of immense ambition and brutal love, he loved us as 
Christ has done, and was content if he might be an imitation 
of Him. ' He beheld the Sonne, the Mone, and the Starres, 
and somoned them to the Love of their Maker.' And so while 
Joachim comes to remind us, not without a very sure appeal 
to the modern world, that the letter killeth but the spirit 
giveth life — his beautiful life, so little understood in his own 
day, has been hidden for us behind the more perfect loveli- 
ness of St. Francis. Of St. Francis who may now speak 
well ? His best biographers were those who had some- 
thing of his spirit, the author of the Fioretti, or those three 
companions who had heard his voice. Full of the lust of 
gold and sensuality and ugliness, how can we, who desire to 
possess everything, understand one whose chief claim on the 
love of mankind was that he possessed nothing whatsoever, 
and having nothing, he gathered all things to himself 1 He 
has been a stranger in the world for many centuries. That 
he proved to us the reality of the life of Jesus, that in his 
perfect appreciation of the beauty of the world he recreated 
art, that he loved mankind as we may dream God has loved 
us — what are these, since he is dead 1 His spirit lives only 
as a beautiful flower pressed between the pages of life. 
And if, as has been said, all men wear mourning for the 
perfect Emperor, how much more may those who have not 
the learning or the wealth or the capacity to understand 
a soul so winsome and so discontentedly in love with 
contentment, mourn continually the little poor man of 
Assisi who went barefoot and was hungry, and lifted the 
worms out of the way that they should not be trodden 
under foot, and understood the birds and all other angels. 
That he, too, was the slave of his own ideas, as when he 
turned even the sick out of that house at Bologna which 



ST. FRANCIS OF ASSISI 271 

had been given to the friars, because ' Poverty is the way to 
salvation ' ; that he failed to understand Frederick ii. and 
the splendour of his paganism and his culture, are merely 
the limitations of his genius; as well might we complain 
that Jesus failed to understand the Roman Empire. 

Ah ! as we pass up and down the Umbrian ways, it is this 
figure which goes ever before us, whispering to us in the 
night in the great rivers that are ceaselessly moving in the 
valleys, and in the daytime in the manifold voices of all 
those things which he loved. He was aware of the love of 
God, since the sun shone, and divined the whole of His tender- 
ness for us in the beauty of a single flower. And though 
it has been said that his life was a kind of failure, that his 
dream was overwhelmed by the materialism of the Church, 
it is impossible to think of failure in his company ; for he 
himself is a figure of immortal beauty, as great in a certain 
diviner fashion as the greatest emperor, seeing that he was 
a poet as it were in the rhythm of life. Finding life, which 
he took as his material, hard and arid as iron, he burned 
and melted it with the fire of his genius, and created out of 
what seemed so unfortunate a priceless and immortal story, 
his own life, that still in all the ages since his death remains 
unequalled in love and beauty, a possession for ever for 
the sorrowful who, like him, only possess the sun, the sky, 
and the flowers. 



XXIII 

ST. CLAEE 

It is impossible to think of St. Clare apart from St. Francis, 
because she loved him. All the sour discretion of the 
historians has not been able to deceive us. in this, for her 
love is the pillar of fire that guides her whole life. In that 
noiseless convent of St. Damian she seems to pass through 
the rooms among the virgins exercising a careful authority, 
exciting a wonderful devotion, but her eyelids have fallen 
over her eyes, hiding the love that burned in them always 
from those who could not understand. Sometimes they 
remark a certain radiance in her face, and ever after think 
of her as one who has seen God ; sometimes it is a kind of 
ecstasy they see, and so they speak of her as attentive to some 
angel or dream; but in reality it is only of Francis she 
dreams, it is to his thoughts she is for ever attentive, nor for 
her is there any angel half so divine as the divine adventurer. 
Born at Assisi in 1194, she was the eldest daughter of 
Favorino Sciffi, a noble knight of considerable wealth. The 
usual somewhat melancholy stories are told of her youth : 
how that she devoted all her time to prayer ; and seeing that 
the Rosary was as yet unknown in Italy, she, in imitation 
of certain ancient anchorites, counted her Paters and Aves 
with little stones in her lap. However this may be — and it 
is perhaps a little distressing to think of a childhood so 
serious, without a thought of the flowers, or the romance of 
to-morrow — it was in the early spring of the year 1212 that 

272 



ST. CLARE 273 

St. Clare first heard St. Francis preach in S. Eufino, the 
Cathedral Church of Assisi. In that magical hour everything 
seemed easy and plain under the eloquence, passionate and 
insistent, of one who was about to capture the world. It was 
springtime and the nights were long and still. As she lay 
in her bed and saw the moon shine through the window, 
and heard the nightingales sing in the garden, and listened 
for the soft whisper of the wind in the trees, the wind that 
had passed through the great forests and over the mountains, 
did she suddenly realise what her life must be 1 or was it only 
after the deep, long thoughts of many days of youth that 
she knew ' she never might have rest in her heart till she 
was come to him and that to him she had opened her heart?' 
We shall never know j but on that night of Palm Sunday a 
little towards dawn she arose and dressed herself in fine 
clothes and ran to St. Francis over the valley. In all that 
spring night, soft with the promise of summer, there was 
nothing more exquisite than St. Clare, her beautiful hair 
streaming behind her, fleeing to St. Francis in the dawn. 
She came to Porziuncola as the fria.rs were singing Matins, 
and they went out to meet her with lighted tapers and began 
to sing the hymn Veni Creatoi\ And St. Francis took her, and 
after Mass he read again to her the words Christ spoke to 
His disciples, and before the altar he dressed her in the 
penitential habit and cut off her hair ; and because as yet he 
had no convent of his own in which to place her, he sent her 
to the Benedictine nunnery of St. Paul, near to Bastia, that 
she might be in safety. But her father and her friends 
came in anger to bring her home again, not without violence ; 
but she, uncovering her head that they might see the havoc 
of the shears, besought them to leave her, since Christ had 
called her to His service and she would have no other Bride- 
groom. So they let her alone, and presently St. Francis 
removed her to the convent of S. Angela in Panso belonging 
S 



274 THE CITIES OF UMBRIA 

to the Benedictines in Assisi, where to her joy she was joined 
by her sister Agnese, who was but fourteen years old. But 
when her kinsmen heard that Agnese also was gone to dwell in 
a convent, they came in great numbers to carry her off. And 
they ' made no force of St.' Clare for to draw her out, for they 
knew well that they should nothing exploit of their intent, 
but they turned to Agnes and said to her : What makest 
thou here 1 Come out with us home to thy house. And she 
answered that she would never depart from the company of 
St. Clare. And a tyrant, a knight, took and drew her by 
the hair, and the others took her by the arms and carried her 
forth afar. And she which deemed that she was among the 
hands of a lion began to cry, and said : Fair, dear sister ! help 
me and suffer not that I be taken from the holy company of 
Jesu Christ. But the felons drew this virgin against her 
will over the mountain, and rent her clothes and drew and 
rased her hair. And the holy sweet virgin St. Clare kneeled 
down and put herself to prayer, and prayed our Lord to give 
her sister a strong heart and a stable, and that she might by 
the puissance of God overcome and surmount the puissance 
of the people. And anon her body became by the power of 
God so pesant and heavy that it seemed that her body were 
fixed to the ground in such wise that for all the force and 
power that they could do they might not bear her over a 
little brook. Then the Lord Mouvalt, her uncle, lift up his 
arm for to beat her cruelly, but an ache and pain took him 
suddenly and tormented him a long time right cruelly. After 
that this said St. Agnes had suffered this long wrestling of 
her kinsmen and friends, came St. Clare and prayed them for 
God's sake they should leave this battle with her sister and 
go their way and take heed of themselves. And she received 
the cure and charge of Agnes her sister, which lay there on 
the ground in great disease, and finally her kinsmen departed 
in great anguish and sorrow of heart.' 



ST. CLAEE 275 

So de Voragine in the Golden Legend tells the sorrowful tale. 
And not long afterwards St. Francis gave Agnes also the 
habit, and placed the two sisters in a little house close to 
St. Damian's, that little church not far outside the walls of 
Assisi which he had rebuilt with his own hands. And we find 
St. Clare made superior of what is really a second Order, for 
while her mind is intent on St. Francis, and occupied with 
his ideas — ideas that at that time, at any rate, were not 
concerned with the foundation of an Order at all but rather 
with a certain liberty of spirit — she has unconsciously founded 
the Congregation of Poor Clares, she being about eighteen 
years old. Soon she is joined by her mother Hortulana and 
several ladies of her kindred to the number of sixteen, and 
then in Perugia, in Arezzo, in Spoleto, in Siena, and Venice, 
in Padua, Mantua, Bologna, and Eome converts spring up 
looking to her and to St. Francis for guidance and direction. 
Agnese, daughter of the King of Bohemia, founds a convent 
of her Order in Prague, she herself becoming a nun ; and in 
Germany also women came under her rule with a kind of 
eager joy, as though they discerned a new sort of liberty in 
this rule of poverty, silence, and obedience. 

It was an age of great enthusiasms, an age of ideas. Pope 
Innocent ill., a great statesman and patriot, seems to have 
been possessed by them no less than Frederic ii., St. Dominic, 
and St. Francis. And it is perhaps in the Franciscan ideal, 
concerned as it was with liberty and joy, the joy that is only 
to be found in a certain light-hearted freedom from the ca.re 
of material things, that we find a really valuable idea, a 
paradox that has confounded the experience of the centuries, 
that would have led us by quiet and orderly ways to a new 
world of labour and love. In that rule of poverty, silence, 
and obedience we may find almost everything that is 
necessary for life : a freedom from the slavery of material 
things, which claim us so eagerly ; a quietness in which we 



276 THE CITIES OF UMBRIA 

may find God and all beautiful things ; an authority which 
will correct our enthusiasm, and save us from the bitter dregs 
of that liberty we are so eager to drain to the end. And so we 
find St. Clare, when at her father's death she is possessed of 
her fortune, giving it wholly to the poor; in spite of the 
Pope's protest, she strips herself of everything in order that 
she may give herself more perfectly to love. She sacrifices 
everything so that she may possess her pearl of price, St. 
Francis. ' Dispose of me as you will,' she says to him, ' I am 
yours; to God I have consecrated my will, it is no longer my 
own.' And he, the little poor man, delights to see her at 
work on beautiful things— fine linen for the service of the 
altar, fair corporals, and the like, which he distributes among 
the churches of Assisi. The long sickness that consumed 
twenty-eight years of her life has begun, she can do little but 
spin and give her body to the devouring spirit ; but at times 
her face is so bright that it dazzles the eyes of them that 
behold her. Suddenly into the quietness of her life comes 
the noise of battle. Frederic ii., at war with the Pope, is 
ravaging the valley of Spoleto with his army of brigands and 
barbarians. They come to take Assisi, and first St. Damian's, 
since it stands without the walls a little way towards Rome. 
Amid all the noise of that brutal assault, the unreality of all 
that, she, already a kind of exile from heaven, intent on no 
earthly business, has herself carried to the gate of the 
convent, while in a pyx the Blessed Sacrament, like a beauti- 
ful and splendid Knight, invisibly guards her. When they 
come upon her, she is lost in prayer, or is it just a divine 
conversation with that heavenly Knight who surrounds her 
with His invincible peaces 'Ah, fair Lord God,' she 
whispers, * please it you then that they that serve you and 
be disarmed, whom I nourish for your love, be brought into 
the hands and power of the paynims'? Fair sweet Lord, 
I beseech thee that thou keep thy handmaidens and servants. 



ST. CLAEE 277 

for I may not keep them in this point.' And in a moment 
He says to her in a gentle voice, strong and beautiful, 'I 
shall keep you always.' Something of the strange beauty 
that seems always to have surrounded her, the terror of the 
barbarian at the sight of anything beautiful, fell upon the 
assailants and they fled. Two Popes visit her, Gregory ix. at 
any rate out of a very real affection for her whom he had known 
from her youth ; and seeing her so ill and so poor he tries 
to absolve her from the vow of Poverty that was St. Francis's 
Bride, but suddenly weeping, she says, I will be assoiled of 
my sins, but the vow of poverty I shall keep unto death. 
Even to her death it was ever for the voice, the thought, of 
Francis that she listened. We catch a glimpse of her one 
day in that long idyll woven between the convent of St. 
Damian and Porziuncola, in the Fioretti, 

'Whenas St. Francis was at Assisi, oftentimes he visited 
St. Clare and gave her holy admonishments. And she 
having exceeding grea,t desire once to break bread with 
him, oftentimes besought him thereto, but he was never 
willing to grant her this consolation ; wherefore his com- 
panions, beholding the desire of St. Clare, said unto St. 
Francis : " Father, it doth appear to us that this severity 
accordeth not with heavenly charity, since thou givest not 
ear unto Sister Clare, a virgin so saintly, so beloved of 
God, in so slight a matter as breaking bread with thee ; and 
above all, bearing in mind that she through thy preaching 
abandoned the riches and pomps of the world. And of a 
truth, had she asked of thee a greater boon than this, thou 
oughtest so to do unto thy spiritual plant." . . . Then spake 
St. Francis : " Since it seems good to you, it seems so, like- 
wise, unto me. But that she may be the more consoled, 
I will that this breaking of bread take place in St. Mary 
of the Angels ; for she has been so long shut up in St. 
Damian, that it will rejoice her to see again the house of 



278 THE CITIES OF UMBRIA 

St. Mary, where her hair was shorn away and she became 
the bride of Jesus Christ ; there let us eat together in the 
name of God." When came the day ordained by him, St. 
Clare with one companion passed forth from out the convent, 
and with the companions- of St. Francis to bear her company 
came unto St. Mary of the Angels, and devoutly saluted the 
Virgin Mary before her altar where she had been shorn and 
veiled ; so they conducted her to see the House until such 
time as the hour for breaking bread was come. And in the 
meantime St. Francis let make ready the table on the bare 
ground as he was wont to do. And the hour of breaking 
bread being come, they sat themselves down together, 
St. Francis and St. Clare, and one of the companions of 
St. Francis with the companion of St. Clare, and all the 
other companions took each his place at the table with all 
humility. And at the first dish, St. Francis began to speak 
of God so sweetly, so sublimely, and so wondrously, that the 
fulness of the divine grace came down on them, and they 
Avere all rapt in God. And as they were thus rapt, with 
eyes and hands uplifted to heaven, the folk of Assisi and 
Bettona and the country round saw that St. Mary of the 
Angels, and all the House, and the wood that was just hard 
by the House, was burning brightly, and it seemed as it were 
a great fire that filled the Church, and the House, and the 
whole wood together : for the which cause the folk of 
Assisi ran thither in great haste for to quench the flames, 
believing of a truth that the whole place was on fire. But 
coming close up to the House, and finding no fire at all, they 
entered within and found St. Francis and St. Clare.' 

And again we see her during a week of passion and 
sorrow in the convent garden, under the old great olives in 
a summer of drought, drinking the tears from the almost 
blind eyes of St. Francis, quenching her thirst for him in 
their bitterness, lifting up his soul in her hands. 



ST. CLARE 279 

That she loved him I will not doubt. She is the woman 
in his life, and yet it is strange that it was Lady Jacoba who 
came to him as he lay dying at Porziuncola, while St. Clare 
might only kiss him when he was dead, on his way to 
burial. 

Ah, but his most joyful and his most sorrowful hours 
were spent with her ! If she heard him sobbing when he 
was blind and helpless, it was in her garden, too, that he 
composed the Canticle of the Sun while she sat at his feet, 
and her love brought him joy as a great gift. Did she 
not long for him as she lay sick in her bed on the eve of 
Christmas, ' in the hour of the nativity of Jesus Christ ; when 
the angels and the world made feast, and sung and enjoyed 
of little Jesus that was born,' and she was alone ? And 
suddenly on the wings of her longing desire she is carried 
to Porziuncola, and of all those friars who sang the Matins 
it is St. Francis she hears, and 'the melody of his song,' till 
she is a little satisfied. 

And when at last she must die, she will not consent to 
leave the world until the Pope has approved of the Rule 
St. Francis made for her. She has called herself ' the little 
flower of St. Francis,' and indeed it was for him she looked 
up into heaven, for him she was sweet by the wayside, for 
him she unfolded the petals of her heart that he might 
rejoice and be comforted on the way to death, and be no 
more alone. 

And if in her we see the spirit destroying the body, as is 
so frequent in the lives of the saints, it was her love that 
kept her even so long from heaven, since Francis loved our 
world. He, too, was not quite fair to Brother Body, should 
she be fairer than he saw fit to be ? For her whole life is 
like a great beautiful lily, towering at the feet of St. Francis, 
that he might drink of her fragrance and be glad of her 
immaculate beauty. As a child almost, this immense love 



280 THE CITIES OF UMBEIA 

swept into her life, and found her ready to give everything 
in exchange for it. And at last when all was accomplished, 
in spite of the tears of her sister and of those who loved her, 
it is alone in all the precious silence and solitude of love that 
she sets out for heaven, to find Francis there among those 
clouds and clouds of saints, not far from the Son of Man 
whom he had taken at His word. 



XXIV 
BEOTHER BERNAED 

OF all those who followed him with so much loyalty and 
love, St. Francis seems to have had an especial affec- 
tion for Brother Bernard, his first disciple. A man of a 
certain age, one of the ' noblest and richest and wisest ' of 
those who ruled in Assisi, his chief characteristic seems to 
have been a love for, a faith in, St. Francis, a perfect appre- 
hension of his idea, the liberty to be attained by poverty. 
This capacity for the reception of ideas in one who was no 
longer young is perhaps a little surprising, and yet it was 
no rare thing in the mission of St. Francis. For we find 
that Silvestro also was a priest, with a certain experience of 
the world, of life, when on that morning St. Francis loaded 
him with Bernard's gold, and taught him suddenly the 
worthlessness of material wealth. Hortulana, too, and how 
many others, had passed their first youth when the dreams 
of the adventurer assailed them, and carried them away into 
that romantic life of the Spirit where St. Francis had founded 
a new kingdom. 

It was while St. Francis was still in the secular habit, that, 
held in scorn of all men, pelted by the children through the 
streets of Assisi, Bernard of Assisi, one of the governors of 
the city, ' began wisely to take heed unto him, how exceed- 
ing strong his contempt of the world, how great his patience 
in the midst of wrongs.' So it is even thus early we may 
discern that one who ' through subtlety of intellect flew up 

281 



282 THE CITIES OF UMBRIA 

even unto the light of the divine Wisdom.' He alone, 
immersed in all the petty affairs of state and city govern- 
ment, the frightful quarrels of the age, enslaved by conven- 
tion and the authority of government, is able to find in 
St. Francis something divine. Full of a certain curiosity, he 
called the fantastic mountebank, the fool of Assisi, the mad 
son of Bernardone to sup with him, and St. Francis consented, 
and supped with him and lodged. There is no record of 
what passed at that strange supper, but Bernard was 
evidently excited by the ideas of his guest, for he set a lamp 
in the chamber and determined to watch his sanctity. 

'And St. Francis,' says the author of the Fioretti, 'And 
St. Francis for to hide his sanctity, when he was come into 
the chamber incontinent did throw himself upon the bed and 
made as though he slept : and likewise Bernard after some 
short space set himself to lie down and fell to snoring loudly, 
in fashion as though he slept right soundly. Whereby 
St. Francis, thinking truly that Bernard was asleep, in his 
sleep rose up from his bed and set himself to pray, lifting up 
his hands and eyes unto heaven, and with exceeding great 
devotion and fervour said : " Deus mi et omnia, Deus mi et 
omnia." And praying thus and sorely weeping he abode till 
morning, always repeating " My God, my God," and naught 
beside.' So through all that long night St. Francis prayed 
and Bernard wondered. And in the morning Bernard said 
to him, ' Brother Francis, I am wholly prepared in my heart 
to leave the world and follow thee in whatsoever thou mayest 
bid me.' It might seem that St. Francis was surprised that 
one who was so securely in possession of this world's goods 
should suddenly desire to be free, and so we find him explain- 
ing the difficulty of the way, the greatness of the task, the 
inevitable weariness that was not altogether obliterated by 
the freedom and the joy of life, the romance of the world; 
it was not till after they had heard Mass and the priest had 



BROTHER BERNARD 283 

taken the missal, and having signed it with the sign of the 
most Holy Cross, had opened it thrice in the name of Jesus 
Christ, that hearing the words the priest read he was convinced 
of the vocation of Brother Bernard. At the first opening- 
appeared the words that Christ spoke in the Gospel to the 
young man that had great possessions, even as Bernard had : 
' If thou wilt be perfect go and sell that thou hast and give to 
the poor and follow me,' And again the second time the priest 
opened the Book at these words which Christ spoke to his 
apostles when he sent them forth to preach : * Take nothing 
for your journey, neither staves, nor scrip, neither bread, 
neither money ; neither have two coats apiece.' And again 
the third time he opened the Book almost at the same 
place and read : ' If any man will come after me, let him 
deny himself and take up his cross daily and follow me.' 
And immediately Bernard went out and sold all that he had, 
for he was rich ; and together with St. Francis he distributed 
the money ' to orphans, to prisoners, to monasteries, and to 
hospices, and to pilgrims.' Then came Silvester, a priest 
who afterwards was a Brother of St. Francis, and said to 
him : ' Thou hast not paid me altogether for the stones to 
rebuild the church, then pay me now since thou hast riches.' 
St. Francis wondered at his greed, and putting his hand into 
Bernard's bosom loaded him with money, promising him 
more if he were not satisfied. 

Reading that valiant tale, shall we wonder that Bernard 
was oftentimes caught up to God, or that St. Francis loved 
him and said that it was he who had founded the Order. He 
was the first to leave the world in order that he might possess 
it the more abundantly ; he gave away all his possessions, 
apprehending in a moment that in reality they possessed 
him ; he understood St. Francis when all mocked him — is it 
wonderful that St. Francis loved him ? For of all those 
Brothers who later came to St. Francis and gave up all 



284 THE CITIES OF UMBRIA 

and followed him, Bernard alone, it seems to me, had under- 
stood the true Franciscan ideal. For that idea he sacrificed 
everything, content if he might in peace and quietness enjoy 
the liberty he had bought at a price so great. 

We see him later in Bologna, this noble of Assisi, mocked 
by the children, spattered with mud, weary and in rags, yet 
always with a joyful countenance, always possessed of a 
serene patience. And again on the banks of a great river 
met by a beautiful youth who greets him with the words, 
' God give thee peace, good brother ' ; and Bernard marvelling 
to hear his native tongue so far from home, asked, ' Whence 
art thou come, good youth ^ ' And he told him, from the 
place where St. Francis dwells. ' But wherefore dost thou 
not cross over?' the youth asked. And Bernard said, 
' Because I fear the danger for the depth of the waters that 
I see.' And the angel, for so he was, answered, ' Let us 
cross over together and be not doubting ' ; and he took him 
by the hand, ' and in the twinkling of an eye set him on the 
other side of the stream.' And having told him his name, 
which was Wonderful, he vanished out of sight. 

In St. Bernard's life we find none of those tricks, those 
fooleries, that in Brother Juniper are a little boisterous but 
a joy for ever. He was a man of grave intelligence who had 
rather understood the Franciscan idea than been carried 
away by its spirit, its irresponsible freedom and liberty. 
For him it might seem that liberty was rather intellectual 
or spiritual than emotional. 

And so when St. Francis comes to die it is for Brother 
Bernard he sends, that he may partake of a certain 'dainty 
dish ' that had been made ready for himself. All Bernard 
can do in that hour of sorrow is to beg for his blessing, for 
he thinks that if St. Francis gives him his blessing, 'God 
Himself and all the brethren will love me better therefor.' 

' The Blessed Francis could not see him, for that by the 



BROTHER BERNARD 285 

space of many days before he had lost the sight of his eyes, 
but stretching forth his right hand he set it upon the head 
of Brother Elias, that was the third ^brother, believing that 
he had set the same upon the head of Brother Bernard that 
sat next him. And straightway perceiving the same by the 
Holy Spirit he said: "This is not the head of my Brother 
Bernard." 

'Then Brother Bernard drew him nigher yet, and the 
Blessed Francis setting his hand upon his head gave him his 
blessing, saying unto one of his companions: "Write that 
which I shall say unto thee. The first brother that the Lord 
did give unto me was Brother Bernard, that did first begin 
and did most perfectly fulfil the perfection of the Holy 
Gospel by giving all his goods unto the poor, by reason 
whereof and by reason of many other prerogatives I am 
bound to love him better than any brother in the whole 
Order. Whence I will and enjoin, so far as I am able, that 
whosoever shall be Minister-General shall love and honour 
him as myself. Let the ministers, moreover, and all the 
brethren of the whole Religion, hold him in my stead."' 

In spite of the neglect into which he fell after the death 
of St. Francis, he has not wanted for champions, the chief of 
which after all is St. Francis himself. He was one of the 
great men of the Kingdom of Heaven, as St. Francis had 
perceived. And so we read that as he too lay a-dying, 
Brother Giles said "with a certain joy, 'Sursum corda, 
Brother Bernard, sursum corda.' Well, it was his right that, 
having lived long, not without joy, at the last he should 
greet death not less cheerfully than he had met life. And 
being at the last hour he spoke these words to the brothers 
that were with him : — 

' brothers most dear, I desire not to speak to you many 
words, but ye should bear in mind that the life of Religion 
that I have had, ye have still now, and this that now I have 



286 THE CITIES OF UMBRIA 

ye shall have also. And this I find within my soul, that for 
a thousand worlds the like of this I would not have served 
any other Lord than our Lord Jesu Christ : and for every 
fault I have committed I do accuse myself, and confess my 
guilt unto my Saviour Jesu and to you. I pray you, my 
brothers most dear, that ye love one another.' And so he 
died. It was St. Francis who compared him to St. John, 
it is strange that he should have used his very words at 
the last. In him we find a certain strength seldom expressed. 
Was it not to him that St. Francis called when nearly blind 
and weary with the way he had comforted himself with the 
assurance that he should find Bernard at th-e end of the 
journey 1 And when he found no Bernard but only a great 
silence in answer to his call, did he not weep, even he, 
St. Francis, for very need of that first disciple, that strong 
and silent brother 1 ' Bernard, come, speak to me, I am blind. 
I want you. I need you.' Yes, we have heard St. Francis 
crying those words ; and it is that cry too we seem to hear 
for years after his death, when, distracted and undone, the 
Brotherhood of St. Francis desired a strong and steadfast 
soul to lead it in the way he had pointed out; and found 
none. 



XXV 
BROTHER ELIAS 

TO write of Brother Elias is to encounter the tragedy of 
the Franciscan Order, and not of the Order alone ; for 
in thinking of the life of a man so full of vitality, so irresist- 
ible, and so strong, we are face to face with the tragedy of 
St. Francis himself, that failure of understanding which 
Jesus suffered too at the hands of his disciples — a blindness 
in men, almost wilful it might seem, and yet so inevitable, to 
the perfection of his simplicity, the beauty of just that, its 
power over the hearts of men, which is perhaps less fatal to 
the master than to those who will not understand. And so, 
when we have disregarded the hatred of centuries, the abuse 
of those who tried to remain loyal to the Rule of St. Francis, 
it is really a very great and a very sorrowful figure that we 
see, ever immersed in work, never free from toil for a single 
moment, when we think of Brother Elias, that Bombarone 
whom St. Francis loved, who revolutionised the Franciscan 
Order, and to whom we owe the beautiful church of San 
Francesco and much of the splendid work on its walls. It is 
the fate of some men to be attracted by what they cannot 
understand. It was so with Brother Elias. St. Francis, 
whom he appears to have met in his youth, overwhelmed 
him with his genius, his exquisite temperament, and the 
beauty of his simplicity. His real tragedy was that he never 
understood the little poor man of Assisi. The immense 
talent of Elias for affairs, for government, for patronage, 

287 



288 THE CITIES OF UMBEIA 

made any understanding of the profoundly Christian, almost 
anarchical, ideas of St. Francis impossible. He has been 
called by those who hated him the Judas Iscariot of St. 
Francis, but in reality he is his St. Paul. His immense 
practical ability made Franciscanism really an international 
power, and while we discern in him the same want of under- 
standing of the ideas of the founder as we find at a greater 
moment in St. Paul, it is to him as to St. Paul that we owe 
the great success of the religion, its power in the world, its 
practical success. He too, like the Apostle of the Gentiles, 
was not among the first followers of his master, yet after his 
death we find him in almost undisputed command ; and again, 
like St. Paul, he is certainly the second great figure in the his- 
tory of the movement, usurping in the first ' Life ' of Thomas 
of Celano a place we might have expected to see filled by one 
of those who were with St. Francis from the beginning, as 
Brother Bernard or Brother Leo. Lacking the charm of 
those dreamers and saints, he is a figure greater by far, more 
human perhaps, without their divine simplicity, more tragic 
in his failure than they in their exquisite success, since he 
succeeded well enough to ruin himself. 

Born at Beviglia, near Assisi, it is said in the same hour as 
St. Francis, and at any rate about the year 1180, he was the 
son of very poor people who earned a bare living by mattress 
making. He himself even in early youth seems to have 
possessed remarkable intelligence, for we find him as a 
schoolmaster in Assisi, leading, as we may think, a very 
quiet life, consumed even in those days by a kind of insati- 
able restlessness and ambition. It is difficult to imagine any- 
thing more diff'erent than the youth of St. Francis from the 
youth of Elias. With every advantage of wealth and rich 
companions, the son of Bernardone took Poverty for his 
bride, while Elias, who during all those long years of youth 
was the servant of every one, desired above all things power 



BROTHER ELIAS 289 

and riches, the which he too compassed before he was old ; 
and, indeed, these two great men — the one a saint of genius, 
the other a statesman of immense talent — are alike only in 
their death, which was for both full of sorrow and dis- 
appointment, coming almost as a relief after assured failure. 
That merciful death which we may believe rases out all the 
bitterness of disappointment from the soul and introduces 
her to yet another illusion, found St. Francis a blind old 
man, scarcely able to walk, regarded even in his own 
Order as a kind of ineffectual saint, divine but impossible, 
unpractical as we might say, loved by all but unregarded, 
the great distinction of the new Order, and yet its most 
embarrassing possession ; and the reason for this was for the 
most part Brother Elias : it found Brother Elias excommuni- 
cated, received at the last, it is true, back into the Church, 
but in a manner so hurried, so irregular, that a searching 
inquiry was held as to the correctness of his reception. Poor 
and without friends, with enemies everywhere, death came to 
him at last as a great deliverance from men whom he had not 
loved as St. Francis had loved them, but whom he had known 
how to govern ; from the Church whom he had served, but 
whom he too had failed to understand ; from his own hatred 
and contempt of a world, so ungrateful and unsatisfying, in 
whom he had trusted. After all, in a way very different, he 
was as great a dreamer as St. Francis, without any such 
compensation as the love of the whole world. 

M. Sabatier suggests that it was he who watched outside 
the cave while St. Francis prayed. However this may be, it 
is certain that Elias was early attracted by St. Francis, and 
that the Saint loved him. It may be that St, Francis dis- 
cerned in him those qualities of practical statesmanship 
which he himself lacked; but we may also remember that 
while many of the early Brothers were wealthy, and used, as 
St. Francis himself was, to the luxuries of the material life, 

T 



290 THE CITIES OF UMBEIA 

Brother Elias was born poor; and it is not unlikely, as it 
seems to me, that one so in love with poverty as St. Francis 
would be naturally attracted to one who, while he possessed 
by right of birth the quality of poverty, was yet of great 
intelligence and by no means ignorant or altogether un- 
learned. That he was utterly without vocation for the 
Franciscan life St. Francis never perceived. To the last he 
trusts Elias almost beyond any of the others. Very near the 
end, when he was nearly blind and is about to submit to the 
rude healing of the day, it is for Brother Elias he sends that 
he may be with him. ' When he had come to the hermitage 
of Fonte Palumbo, near to Eieti,' says the Speculum Perfec- 
tionis, ' for the cure of the infirmity of his eyes whereunto he 
was compelled on his obedience by the Lord Bishop of Ostia 
and by Brother Elias, the Minister-General, one day the 
leech came unto him, who, after examining his infirmity, 
said unto the Blessed Francis that he wished to make a 
cautery over the cheek as far as the eyebrow of the eye that 
was worse than the other. But the Blessed Francis would 
not that he should begin the operation save Brother Elias 
was there,- for that he had said he would . fain be present 
when the leech should begin that operation, for the Blessed 
Francis was afraid, and right grievous was . it unto him that 
he should have so great solicitude about himself ; wherefore 
he would that the Minister-G-eneral should be the one to 
have everything done as concerning him.' 

And again in the Chapter of 1221, when we first see Elias 
as Minister-General and President of the Chapter, we find 
St. Francis, just returned from Eome where he had met 
St. Dominic and Frederic ii. (who appears to have loved 
him), sitting at Elias's feet and plucking at his robe ' when 
there was anything that he wished to have put before the 
Brothers.' Had St. Francis understood the danger his ideas 
were in from Elias, it is not in such an attitude we should 



BROTHER ELIAS 291 

find him. But the rule of Elias proved, in outward seeming 
at least, most beneficial to the Order, for we find a large 
increase in the number of Brothers soon after his appoint- 
ment as Minister-General. And, indeed, Elias was the 
statesman of an Order that till he came had no need of any- 
thing but saints. He founded the Franciscan Order upon 
the Brothers Minor. He gave it its innumerable churches, 
its convents, its great monasteries. He found it a divine 
society, as it were, which possessed nothing but a great love 
for mankind ; he left it immersed in its splendid possessions. 
Even so early as this we find him undermining those ideas 
of Poverty as the way of salvation. For when St. Francis 
retired 'into a certain mountain' to make the Rule of 1223, 
many ministers came to Elias and said to him, 'We have 
heard that this Brother Francis maketh a new Rule, but we 
be feared lest he should make it too harsh in such sort that 
we cannot observe it. Wherefore we will that thou go 
unto him and tell him that we will not be bound unto that 
Rule. Let him make it for himself and not for us.' Unto 
whom Brother Elias made answer that he would not go 
without them, whereupon they all of them did go together. 
And when Brother Elias was nigh the place where Blessed 
Francis was standing, Brother Elias called him ; who, making 
answer, and beholding the ministers aforesaid, the Blessed 
Francis said : ^ What would these brethren 1 ' And said 
Brother Elias : ' They be ministers that have heard how 
thou makest a new Rule, and being afeared lest thou make 
it too harsh, do say and protest that they will not be bound 
thereunto. Make it for thyself alone, and not for them.' 
Thereupon Blessed Francis did turn his face towards Heaven 
and spake unto Christ on this wise : . ' Lord, said I not well 
when I told Thee they would not believe me?' Then all 
did hear the voice of Christ that made answer in the air : 
'Francis, naught is there of thine own in the Rule, but 



292 THE CITIES OF UMBRIA 

whatsoever is therein is all Mine own, and My will it is 
that thus shall the Rule be observed to the letter, to the 
letter, to the letter, without gloss, without gloss, without 
gloss.' 

Whether or no this strange incident is an invention of 
the Zealots in their hatred of Elias, it is certainly founded 
upon the fact that, long before the death of St. Francis, 
Elias was working with the intention of suppressing the 
troublesome Rule of Poverty, about which St. Francis was 
so insistent. Around the death-bed of St. Francis many 
stories have gathered. It is impossible to believe the 
malicious tales that certain of the Zealots, have told of 
Elias. He loved St. Francis ; that he did not understand 
him was not altogether his fault. How many understood 
him in his own day 1 how few since ! Whether St. Francis 
gave his blessing to Leo or Bernard or Elias, it was Elias 
who really took over the government of the Order after 
St. Francis's death. It was he who conceived the idea of 
building San Francesco ; it was he who wrote that strange 
letter to Brother Gregory of Naples, Provincial of France; 
it was he who managed the temporary burial in San Giorgio. 
It is from, this point his real career begins. And in spite of 
the fact that he destroyed the fundamental idea of St. 
Francis upon which he had built the whole of his life, his 
first plans are for the honour of the dead saint. Whether 
he saw the indispensable value of the life of St, Francis for 
the success of his own plans, or whether indeed the Pope 
and the Church, a little suspicious of so literal a following 
of certain words in the Gospel, were too strong for him, 
we may not know ; at least he raised that church, the glory 
of Assisi, and one of the loveliest Gothic buildings in the 
world, splendid with the work of so many artists^ to 
guard the body of his friend. And if he spoiled that work 
of St. Francis which as an idea he could not understand, 



BROTHER ELIAS 293 

he was able to translate something of the beauty that shone 
in the soul of the saint into everlasting stone, that we too 
might understand it and catch some 'reflection of what his 
eyes had seen. Nor was he content with such a monument, 
but with a knowledge of men worthy of him, he selected 
Thomas of Celano, a Brother who had doubtless loved St. 
Francis, and an artist in letters, to write his biography, 
producing in this way a book scarcely surpassed in any 
literature for its style, its enthusiasm, and the immense 
number of its readers. The Bollandists used it for the Acta 
Sanctorum, and it remains to this day a work of the utmost 
importance in the study of the life of St. Francis, and 
almost the only authority we have for the life of Elias 
himself. . 

In 1227 John Parenti had been elected Minister-General. 
Though such a choice must have disappointed Elias, it 
would appear that he was unmoved by it. In 1228 the 
Pope — that G-regory who had known and loved St. Francis 
— came to Assisi to canonise him. In 1229 the life of 
Thomas of Celano had been written. In 1230 the body of 
St, Francis was translated from S. Giorgio to the new 
church in San Francesco, of which Elias was master of the 
works. He determined to assert his power. Gathering 
his friends together, invoking the aid of the authorities in 
Assisi, who were naturally impressed by the power of the 
man who was the friend of the Pope, and who had built 
the mighty church on the Colle del Inferno, he took the 
body of the saint from S. Giorgio, and secretly by night 
buried it in San Francesco, where till our own day it 
remained hidden. Thus he declared war on John Parenti, 
who meantime had gathered the- regular assembly at 
Porziuncola. But the friends whom Elias had brought to 
Assisi stormed the assembly, and in a mom^ent had placed 
Elias in the chair of the Minister-General, only a little 



294 THE CITIES OF UMBEIA 

later to be themselves expelled and Elias with them, by 
the enraged Brothers. The General appealed to the Pope, 
who threatened the secular powers with excommunication, 
and placed the new church and convent under an interdict. 
This was no doubt a terrible blow to Elias. He seems to 
have retired rather in anger than in any sort of repentance, 
only the more determined to succeed when another oppor- 
tunity occurred. Possessed by his idea of making the 
Franciscan Order a power in and for the Church, he was really 
at one with the Pope, although the means he employed were 
those rather of a soldier than a Brother Minor. He appears 
to have remained in a kind of exile for some time, while his 
ideas were inevitably undermining the whole Order. ' John 
Parenti,' says Miss Macdonell in her delightful book. The 
Sons of Francis, ' was no very strong rival. A good man 
of beautiful nature, and if we were to accept the view of 
Pere d'Alen9on concerning the authorship of the Sacrum 
Commercium, of a charming fancy ; but perhaps lacking the 
strong personality that would make his views growingly 
accepted.' However that may be, and that he was a good 
man is not open to doubt, it seems to me nothing short of a 
second St. Francis, perhaps a continual generalship by men 
of the greatness of St. Francis himself, could have saved 
the Order from the ambition of the Church. It was almost 
impossible that any society could maintain itself within, or 
indeed in those days without, the Church, and at the same 
time by its very character accuse her of a kind of com- 
promise with the world. Certainly the Church took the 
responsibility of destroying the Franciscan ideal, not because 
it was impossible, but because it was in its principle of life 
anarchical, and therefore antagonistic to her government. 
St. Francis had not understood this, was indeed really 
incapable of understanding it; and even as he trusted Elias 
so he trusted the Pope and the Catholic Church, whose son 




CHAPEL IN S. FRANCESCO, ASSISI 



BEOTHER ELIAS 295 

he was. Had he understood the view the Church must 
necessarily take of his movement, the revolutionary appeal 
behind her to the text of Scripture, Tie would, as I think, 
have submitted himself, since the whole character of his 
teaching and of his life may be said to be non-resistance, 
even evil being better overcome by good than resisted 
openly. 

In September 1230 Gregory signed the Bull Quo elongati, 
and a little later John Parenti resigned and Elias was 
elected in his stead. A great change is at once to be found 
in the Order. Hitherto, it had been a pure democracy, in 
which the virtue of obedience was taught as a kind of 
spiritual gymnastic. It now became an army led by a great 
general \vho claimed obedience as a right, whose aim was 
not so much the salvation of man — though ultimately that 
might be said to be his object — as power over the hearts 
of men, power in the government of the Church, power in 
the government of nations, power — more power than for 
instance the Order of St. Dominic might win — in everything. 
There were many who remembered old days and rebelled. 
That idea of Poverty as a bride, as the great Liberator — even 
then Liberty being the mistress, perhaps a little bashful, 
secretly in the hearts of men — was difficult to slay. Elias 
dealt with the Zealots as a general might deal with mutineers. 
Caesar of Speyres, his own convert, he killed, it is said 
accidentally ; many he scourged, and others he exiled. 
, His chief need was money to complete San Francesco — 
that monument which is to-day certainly as much his as 
St. Francis's. It was he, probably at the Pope's suggestion, 
who employed those Eoman painters under Pietro Cavallini 
to paint the roof of the upper church. Giunta Pisano also 
he employed, and about 1236 sat to him for his portrait, 
which has been lost. His manner of life at this time seems 
to have been rather that of a lord than that of a friar. But 



296 THE CITIES OF UMBRIA 

his health was delicate. In 1238 Gregory IX. sent him as 
ambassador to Frederic ii. He appears to have impressed 
the Emperor as a man of great ability. Perhaps the Pope 
suspected him of intriguing with his enemy, or perhaps his 
rule was stirring up too much strife ; however that may be, 
in 1239 the Pope for the first time listened to the complaints 
of the Zealots against him. It was an Englishman, Symon 
of Faversham, who spoke against him. Among other some- 
what futile charges, he accused him of heaping up money 
for himself. This Elias indignantly denied, and the Pope 
suggested that he should place his case in his hands as Head 
of the Church. But Elias would not. Then the Pope in 
anger told them all how he had chosen Elias from among 
them because he loved St. Francis, and such an one he 
thought would please every one of them. If it were not so, 
then they might proceed to elect another general. They 
chose Albert of Pisa. Thus fell a great man whose tragedy 
was to have loved St. Francis rather than Frederic ii. He 
went to Cortona. Nor would he listen to the Pope, nor to 
the new general. He went to the Emperor, who employed him 
gladly. Gregory excommunicated him. It is said that he 
wrote to the Pope stating his case, which he appears to have 
thought, perhaps not without justice, had never been heard. 
He sent the letter to Albert of Pisa, in whose pocket it was 
found after his death. 

In 1241 Gregory died, and with him all hope of pardon for 
Elias. We see him at the court of Frederic still wearing his 
habit, sometimes going on long journeys for Frederic, and in 
return winning certain distinctions for the city and people of 
Cortona, where he had made his home. Later, they granted 
him land and built for him a great convent. But in 1250 
Frederic died, and his employment was gone. He retired to 
his convent in Cortona, and seems to have followed the ways 
and tastes, the sunless pleasures, of one who had been 



BEOTHEK ELIAS 297 

defeated. He was no rebel ; he had been used to command 
rather than suffer discipline and listen to the orders of 
others; his excommunication weighed heavily upon him. 
So he sent for the local clergy and made his submission, and 
they in his last hours gave him absolution, consoling him, 
if it might be, for all his disasters with the Blessed 
Sacrament which he, in all simplicity, still held to be divine 
indeed. 

In the life of this great man we see the profound inability 
of the world to understand St. Francis. The Franciscan 
ideal failed to touch Elias. He loved St. Francis, but he 
did not understand him ; at all times they who loved him 
have been more than they who understood him. Elias, 
though born poor, perhaps because of it, was dependent upon 
the material possessions of the world. Without them he 
was almost nothing. AVith them St. Francis had amused 
himself, without them he in some sort conquered the world. 
It is the difference between two ideas of which the one is no 
longer heard of. Henceforth the Franciscan Order was a 
Society differing but slightly from the Dominican or the 
Benedictine Orders. It existed for the service of the Church 
rather than for the service of men. Perhaps that was the 
inevitable fate of a movement, very lovely in itself, which 
taught rather by vision than knowledge, preaching a kind 
of divine philosophy which, in those who sought to keep 
the Eule of St. Francis, degenerated into something very 
dike heresy under John of Parma. The mysterious pro- 
phecies of the Eternal Gospel, rather than the simpler 
teaching of the Gospel of Jesus that had so filled the life of 
St. Francis, appealed to them. And we come to think of them 
as we think of any other order of friars, finding there indeed 
little to differentiate them from the rest, seeing that St. 
Francis was in heaven and there was no one on earth who 
understood and remembered him. 



CONCLUSION 

WHAT is that Angel, splendid, shy, elusive, whom we 
pursue sometimes with so much haste and vulgarity, 
and always in vain, on our travels through dead or living 
cities, over the immense miles of the deserts, or through the 
horrid limitations of space strangled in mean streets, but the 
Spirit of Place 1 Sometimes, as in some great city antique 
and wonderful, this white Angel is strong and full of vitality, 
and splendid amid dead or dying things; sometimes, as in 
the brutal highways of some trumpery modern capital, he is 
shy and timid, so elusive, that it is perhaps only for a 
moment, gone while we try to apprehend it, that we feel the 
wind of his wings or catch one breathless half-word whispered 
as he vanishes. 

Yet it is always in vain that we pursue him, he is not to 
be hunted by even the cleverest among us. If we find him 
it is always on some fortunate day when we least expect it, 
when we are thinking of other things. He who sets out to 
bring him home in triumph is bewildered by shadows or 
reality. To visit some ancient, indestructible city with 
difficulty, after much longing, perhaps at night, to be forced 
to leave after one intoxicating look, is to catch a miraculous 
glimpse of that swift Angel brooding over the immemorial 
splendour and ruin of the world, in the hours when he knows 
he need not fear the pursuit of the vulgar. 

It is so one might look on the Roman Campagna for the 
first time, with eyes a little weary for some great spacious- 
ness, and so suddenly an indestructible memory of profound 

298 



CONCLUSION 299 

beauty would impress itself on the imagination : the image 
of the lonely majesty of the Campagna, littered with the 
monsters of old forgotten religions ; full of the dead things 
of Paganism and Christianity, the bones of saints, the mighty 
trunks of forgotten gods. 

But perhaps it is really only in words that we possess our 
heart's desire. Words are visions. Italy herself was never 
half so gracious as the dream which is eternal in her name. 
And if her wrongs are written in ashes, we may find all her 
splendour in the word Rome. Is it not so with everything ? 
Was any woman, howsoever beloved, half so radiant as she 
who hides for ever in the name ? And if I say the word 
Princess, it is not any mortal royalty I see. For the fairest 
girl is less fair than Helen of Troy, the loveliest woman how 
much less lovely than Cleopatra, and she who has given us 
all has yet not loved us as Isoud loved. Have we ever 
really seen a bleeding topaz, even on a Pope's finger, or in 
any Queen's ear those rubies cut in the shape of drops of 
blood I It is really only those things which we have not 
seen that we possess, since all the gold of Ophir will not buy 
Eldorado. For who, having heard the name of Athens, may 
be content with any other city 1 And since this is so with 
Perfumes and Jewels and Women, how may we reconcile the 
world with our expectations of it ? 

•There is but one escape from the immense disillusion of 
reality, but one medicine that will cure us of our disappoint- 
,ment. It is in Art that all beauty lies, and there is nothing 
perfect upon earth but man has made it. It is that breath- 
less half-word that the Angel whispers as he vanishes, and 
it is with this purification that all that is best in the world 
must come to us. To see anything as in itself it really is, 
is to understand what it might have been, what it may be. 

Thus there is more truth in Poetry than in History, and 
the only reality we may know is that which has been con- 



300 THE CITIES OF UMBRIA 

ceived by man. Achilles lives since Homer sang of him, 
but who has remembered the princes of Egypt, or the lovers 
that walked by the Phoenician Sea 1 So Agamemnon remains 
the king of kings, while Lycurgus is as a forgotten dawn. What 
were Francesca and Paolo Malatesta if Dante had passed 
them by, or Cleopatra if Shakespeare had not told us of her, 
or even Jesus of Nazareth without the perfect syllables of 
the Gospels 1 Names that come to us in dreams, ghosts that 
wander in the abyss of time, words that are lovelier than the 
roses. And so it is that the night of Christmas is the only 
one in all the centuries that we really remember ; and the 
dawn of the first Easter is fairer far than any .that broke the 
blossoms white and red in the gardens of Babylon. While 
for those who may see, every ancient altar in the world is 
still green with bays and grey with olive. 

In Umbria, perhaps, we miss those everlasting garlands 
less than anywhere else in the world. Here, we have not 
yet banished the gods, those indestructible witnesses to the 
wisdom and beauty that is from of old ; still, still, they laugh 
in the woods, or in the reeds beside the river whisper 
together, a little fearful of our approach. And if you have 
seen April all in red and white dancing through the valleys, 
you have seen a goddess, and are happy : remember then, 
how few are the seasons she will go by before you too will 
not know whether her white feet come swiftly, or linger by 
the Eastern Sea. Ah, be wise, love her while you may, for 
she is still the fairest in the world. 

And that you should fail to understand my book, it is 
but a little thing : but that you should fail to love Umbria, 
it is a disaster for you, since she gives you what you bring 
to her, and her angel is ever gracious to those who come 
to her quiet places not hurriedly at all, but with a certain 
reverence. 



INDEX 



Agnese, S., 274. 
Angela, S., of Foligno, 53, 64. 
Angelico, Fra, 107, 146, 147. 
Assisi, 23-44. 
City of S. Francis, 23. 
Churclies — 
Duomo, 43. 
S. Cliiara, 43-44. 
S. Damiano, 43. 
S. Francesco, 32-43. 
Lower Cliiirch, 32-39. 
Chapels — 
S. Antonio, 42. 
Blessed Sacrament, 35. 
S. Maria Maddalena, 35. 
. S. Martino, 33. 
Tomb of S. Francis, 35. 
Upper Church, 39-42, 137. 
S. Maria degli Angeli, 26-31. 
Cell Avhere S. Francis died, 

28-29. 
Chapel of Eoses, 30. 
Porzinncola, 28-31. 
Eose garden, 29. 
Hermitage of Carceri, 44. 
Tempio di Minerva, 43, 
The way from Penigia to Assisi, 
' 24-26. 
The way from S. Maria degli An- 
geli to Assisi, 31. 



Bartoli, Taddeo, 134. 
Benedict, S., 229. 
Bernard, Brother, 281-286. 
Bernardino, S., 12, 17-20. 
Boccatis, 134. 



Bonfigli, Benedetto, 133, 147, 148. 

181-188. 
Borgia, Cesare, 126. 
Liicrezia, 127. 

Cagli, 111. 

Cavallini, Pietro, 32, 39-42. 
Chiara, S., 28, 256, 259, 272-280. 
Cities of Umbria, 3-130. 
Citta della Pieve, 99-101. 
Cosmati, The, 140. 

Della Eobbia, 28. 
Domenico, S., 21, 260-261. 

Elias, Brother, 230, 287-297. 
England and Italy in seventeenth 

century, 117. 
Ercolano, S., 6. 

Fabriano, 110. 

Gentile da, 110, 145-146. 
Foligno, 50-55. 

Cathedral, 53. 

Palazzo Trinci, 50-51. 

S. Francesco, 55. 

S. Maria, 54. 

S. Niccolo, 53. 
Forli, Melozzo da, 126, 164-167. 
Francesca, Piero della, 116, 126, 133, 

153-163. 
Francis, S., 21, 28, .29, 30, 55-59, 

239-242, 243-271, 273, 277, 278, 

281, 282. 
Frederic n., 275, 276. 
Furlo Pass, 113-114. 

Giotto, 32, 33, 34, 35-39,- 41-42. 
Goes, Hugo van der, 195. 

301 



302 



THE CITIES OF UMBRIA 



Gozzoli, Benozzo, 53-54, 58, 146, 147. 
Gubbio, 102-109. 

Eugubian Tables, 108. 

History of, 103. 

Monte Calvo, 103. 

On the way to, 102. 

Palazzo Ducale, 104. 

Palazzo Municipale, 108. 

Procession of Ceri, 109. 

S. Agostino, 109. 

Henry vii. of England, 116. 
Innocent hi. , 252, 275. 

Jacoba, Lady, 266-269. 
Joachim di Flore, 227-242. 
John of Parma, 231, 238. 
John Parent!, 293, 295. 
Juniper, Brother, 284. 

Laurentius II,, 146. 
Lippo, Filippo, 66-67, 108. 
Lorenzo, Fiorenzo di, 134, 148, 149, 
189-200. 

Malatesta, Sigismondo, 120-122, 
Martin, S., 34. 
Martini, Simone, 33-35. 
Michelangelo, 136, 151, 175 
Middle Age, -228, 244. 
Montefalco, 56-59, 

S, Forfcunato, 58. 

S. Francesco, 55.' 

Narni, 72-75. 

On the way to, 72. 

Koman bridge, 73-75. 
Nelli, Martino, 144. 
- — Ottaviano, 33, 50-53, 106-108, 

144-145. 
Niccolo da Foligno, 55-58 146-147. 

Oderigi, 105-106, 107, 143. 
Orvieto, 84-98. 

Bishop's Palace, 85. 

Duomo, 85, 89-97. 



Cappella del Corporale, 95. 

Nuova, 95-97, 

Fagade, 90-94, 
Miracle of Bolsena, 85. 
Opera del Duomo, 85. 
Ospedale, 85. 
Palazzo Soliano, 85-88, 97. 

Palmerucci, Guido, 144. 
Perugia, 3-22. 
Cambio, 210-212. 
Churches — 

S. Agata, 21. 

S. Angelo, 21. 

S. Bernardino, 16. 

S. Domenico, 14. 

Duomo, 10-11. 

S. Ercolano, 13, 

S. Francesco al Prato, 12, 21. 

S, Martino, 21. 

S, Pietro, 13-16. 
Convent of S. Agnese, 22. 
Electric tramway, 4, 11. 
Fountain, 12. 
History, 5-9. 
Miracle picture, 4, 11. 
Origin, 5. 

Palazzo Municipio, 4, 12-13. 
Piazza Danti, 4, 11.. 
Porta Augusta, 5. 

Eburnea, 5, 

Eomana, 14. 

S. Angelo, 21. 

Queen of hill cities, 5. 
S. Bernardino, 12, 17-20. 
Tomb of Pope Benedict xi., 14, 

of Volumnii, 25. 

Via Appia, 21. 
Perugino, Pietro, 10, 22, 28, 61, 99- 

101, 133, 149-150, 201-217. 
Pintoricchio, Bernardino, 45-48, 150, 
218-224. 

Eaphabl, 111, 136, 150-152, 
Koman School, 32, 39-41, 140-142, 
Eome and Art, 136-139, 



INDEX 



30: 



Sabatier, M. Paul, 243-244, 251- 

256, 289. 
Sanzio, Giovanni, 111-113. 
S. Severino, Giacomo di, 146. 

Lorenzo di, 146. 

Signorelli, Luca, 96, 126, 134, 168- 

180. 
Sistine Chapel, 136-137. 
Spello, 45-49. 
Duomo, 46. 
Chapel of Blessed Sacrament, 46- 
48. 
Pintoricchio, 45-48. 
Porta Veneris, 45. 
S. Andrea, 48. 
Spoleto, 64-71. 
Churches — 
Del Crocefisso, 67. 
Duomo, 65-67, 
S. Paolo, 68-69. 
S. Pietro, 69. 
Franciscan convent, 64, 
Holy Week at, 69-71. 
La Kocca, 65. 



Temple of Clitumnus, 61-62. 
Terni, 73. 
Todi, 76-83. 
Chiu'clies — 
Duomo, 78-80. 
S. Fortunate, 80. 
S. Ilaria, 80. 

S. Maria dellaConsolazione, 81-83, 
S. Maria in Camuccia, 81. 
On the way, 76-78. 
Palazzo Municipio, 79, 80. 
Trevi, 60-63. 

Umbria, Cities of, 3-130. 

Mystica, 227-300. 

Umbrian Art, 133-152. 

Painting, 131-224. 

Urbino, 115-130. 

Customs and manners, 116. 

Duke Federigo, 122-125. 

Francesco Maria, 125-127. 

History, 116-130. 

On the way to, 109-114, 

Sigismondo Malatesta, 120-122. 



Printed by T, aud A. Constable, Printers to His Majesty 
at the Edinburgh University Press 



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